Soft robots have the potential to greatly improve human-robot interaction via intrinsically safe, compliant designs. However, new compliant materials used in soft robotics – artificial muscles – are fabricated with poor tolerances and have time-varying dynamics. Therefore, a key technical challenge is to develop adaptive control algorithms for these materials. Here, we take a novel bioinspired ...

For decades, EAP received relatively little attention due to their limited actuation capability. However, in the last fifteen years a series of Electroactive Polymers (EAP) materials have emerged that produce a significant shape or size change in response to electrical stimulation. These materials have the closest functional similarity to biological muscles enabling to engineer novel capabiliti...

This paper reports mechanical testing and modeling results for the McKibben artificial muscle pneumatic actuator. This device, first developed in the 1950's, contains an expanding tube surrounded by braided cords. We report static and dynamic length-tension testing results and derive a linearized model of these properties for three different models. The results are briefly compared with human m...

10 Abstract This paper introduces the third generation of Pleated Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PPAM), which has been developed to simplify the production over the first and second prototype. This type of artificial muscle was developed to overcome dry friction and material deformation, which is present in the widely used McKibben muscle. The essence of the PPAM is its pleated membrane structur...

Pneumatic Artificial Muscles have found application in many sectors of industry. However, their large dimensions make them useless in medical robotics. Therefore, Transversal Artificial Muscles were designed. This innovative construction is characterized by much smaller dimensions and high strength relative to the total volume change. Also, they allow obtaining a linear displacement by changing...

Muscles fulfill several functions within an animal’s body. During locomotion they propel and control the limbs in unstructured environments. Therefore, the functional workspace of muscle needs to be represented by variables describing energy management (i.e. power output, efficiency) as well as control aspects (i.e. stiffness, damping). Muscles in the animal kingdom vary greatly with respect to...

   Micro-electroactive polymers have wide applications from industry to healthcare. Artificial muscles, microvalves, microswitches, haptic sensing, blood pressure and pulse monitoring are some potential applications for micro-electroactive polymers. The most advantage of micro-electroactive polymers as sensors and actuators is bio-compatibility and low power threshold for large deformations...

Pneumatic artificial muscles exhibit highly non-linear static characteristics especially due to inherent properties of their materials and compressibility of air. Therefore, it is difficult to control them without adequate modeling and simulation. The paper deals with the numerical approximation of the static characteristics of McKibben pneumatic artificial muscle. The muscle force dependence o...

Bio-Inspired Soft-Rigid Hybrid Smart Artificial Muscle In article number 2206342, Hongmiao Tian and co-workers propose a soft-rigid hybrid smart artificial muscle (SRH-SAM), which ingeniously coordinates the actuation, load-bearing, sensory systems. Based on SRH-SAM, an advanced approach for reconfigurable blazed grating plane new strategy controllable attachment/detachment transformation in fi...