didn't read article due to paywall, but the answer is most likely yes. i was able to build a basic 2-degrees-of-freedom robot-arm grabber using lego technic and power functions and was controlled by scratch on a raspberry pi. lego also has pneumatics.
There's an industrial robot arm built out of LEGO Technic bricks by OrangeApps, a small company related to German robot manufacturer KUKA. [1] It's primarily used for educational purposes.
It would be much larger and very expensive but if it could be done it would be challenging to replicate using the same one motor and gear train design but I'm sure some LEGO wizard out there could pull it off given that we've seen some amazing LEGO builds in the past like mechanical calculators.