Artificial muscles are man-made materials that try to reproduce the two main characteristics of real muscle fibers, namely, elasticity and contractility. They respond to various external stimulations (ion concentration, electric field, temperature, light etc.) by a significant shape or size change. In addition to classical materials such as piezoelectric ceramics and shape memory alloys, polyme...

Braided pneumatic artificial muscles, and in particular the better known type with a double helical braid usually called the McKibben muscle, seem to be at present the best means for motorizing robotarms with artificial muscles. Their ability to develop high maximum force associated with lightness and a compact cylindrical shape, as well as their analogical behavior with natural skeletal muscle...

Chromatophores are the pigment-containing cells in the skins of animals such as fish and cephalopods which have chromomorphic (colour-changing) and controllable goniochromic (iridescent-changing) properties. These animals control the optical properties of their skins for camouflage and, it is speculated, for communication. The ability to replicate these properties in soft artificial skin struct...

A challenging topic in articulated robots is the control of redundantly many degrees of freedom with artificial muscles. Actuation with these devices is difficult to solve because of nonlinearities, delays and unknown parameters such as friction. Machine learning methods can be used to learn control of these systems, but are faced with the additional problem that the size of the search space pr...

Being inherently compliant, the robotic artificial muscles are increasingly popular in applications such as safe human-robot interaction, legged robotics, prostheses and orthoses, and soft robotics. Their full utilization is often challenged by the coupled hysteresis among input, strain, and tension force. Although conventional two-dimensional hysteresis models are available, no prior studies o...

The construction of artificial muscles is one of the most challenging developments in today's biomedical science. The application of artificial muscles is focused both on the construction of orthotics and prosthetics for rehabilitation and prevention purposes and on building humanoid walking machines for robotics research. Research in biomechanics tries to explain the functioning and design of ...

Coiled Artificial Muscles In article number 2210419, Zhen Jiang, Geoffrey M. Spinks, and co-workers introduce a liquid crystalline organogel combined into twisted coiled fiber geometry to generate powerful soft artificial muscle with fast response small temperature changes.