Fluid‐Driven High‐Performance Bionic Artificial Muscle with Adjustable Muscle Architecture

Xie, Disheng; Su, Yujie; Li, Xiaolu; Chen, Jingxun; Shi, Xiang Qian; Yip, Joanne; Liu, Jianbin; Li, Zheng; Tong, Kai-Yu

doi:10.1002/aisy.202200370

Advanced Intelligent Systems

2023

DOI: 10.1002/aisy.202200370

|View full text |Cite

Fluid‐Driven High‐Performance Bionic Artificial Muscle with Adjustable Muscle Architecture

Disheng Xie

Yujie Su

Xiaolu Li³

et al.

Abstract: High-performance artificial muscle is always the pursuit of researchers for robotics. Herein, a bionic artificial muscle is reported called "ExoMuscle" mimicking the sarcomere in skeletal muscle with a bio-inspired structure to contract "myofilaments" enabling the artificial muscle to mimic the architecture of muscle such as parallel, fusiform, convergent, and pennation and beyond the performance of skeletal muscle. The reported actuators excel in various aspects compared with skeletal muscle including actuati… Show more

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

2023

2024

Publication Types

Select...

Article3

Relationship

Self Cite0

Independent3

Authors

Journals

Cited by 3 publications

References 70 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

Sarcomere‐Inspired Multilayer Artificial Muscle Units for Hyperconfigurable Robotic Applications

Ambrose,

Tan,

Chiang

et al. 2023

Advanced Intelligent Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Soft pneumatic biomimetic robotic systems excel at the specific application they are designed for, often to interact or navigate unstructured environments safely. However, redeployment to new purposes requires substantial resources, from redesign to revalidation. Despite most pneumatic artificial muscles surpassing the power and contraction performance of natural muscles, natural muscles largely remain unmatched in terms of their versatility and complex performance. This is likely due to artificial muscle's low effective strain and high radial expansion, limiting parallel operating efficiencies. To address these challenges, a class of compact versatile pneumatic actuators, called multilayer artificial muscle (MAM), that are capable of deployment to different applications through configurable modularity, is presented. The MAMs are biomimetically inspired by the sarcomere, the building block for natural muscle architecture. Similarly, MAM can extend and contract as well as be rearranged to mimic muscle‐like actions and functions, such as a caterpillar locomotion robot and an entire robotic arm. The MAMs are fabricated through multilayer, multimaterial, low‐cost additive manufacturing, which offers certain advantages such as higher extension, contraction force, and durability. MAMs have the potential to provide a crucial fundamental building block toward future versatile reconfigurable architecture.

show abstract

Sarcomere‐Inspired Multilayer Artificial Muscle Units for Hyperconfigurable Robotic Applications

Ambrose,

Tan,

Chiang

et al. 2023

Advanced Intelligent Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Architectural gear ratio depends on actuator spacing in a physical model of pennate muscle

Sleboda,

Roberts,

Azizi

2024

Bioinspir. Biomim.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Pennate muscles are defined by the architectural arrangement of their muscle fibers, which run at an angle to the primary axis of muscle shortening. Pennation angles can vary dynamically over the course of individual contractions, influencing the speed and distance of muscle shortening. Despite their relevance to muscle performance, the physical mechanisms that drive dynamic changes in pennation angle remain poorly understood. Muscle fibers bulge radially as they shorten, a consequence of maintaining a constant internal fluid volume, and we hypothesized that radial interactions between tightly packed muscle fibers are essential to dynamic pennation angle changes. To explore this, we built physical models of pennate muscles in which the radial distance between fiber-like actuators could be experimentally altered. Models were built from pennate arrays of McKibben actuators, a type of pneumatic actuator that forcefully shortens and bulges radially when inflated with compressed air. Consistent with past studies of biological muscle and engineered pennate actuators, we found that the magnitude of pennation angle change during contraction varied with load. Importantly, however, we found that pennation angle changes were also strongly influenced by the radial distance between neighboring McKibben actuators. Increasing the radial distance between neighboring actuators reduced pennation angle change during contraction and effectively eliminated variable responses to load. Radial interactions between muscle fibers are rarely considered in theoretical and experimental analyses of pennate muscle; however, these findings suggest that radial interactions between fibers drive pennation angle changes and influence pennate muscle performance. Our results provide insight into the fundamental mechanism underlying dynamic pennation angle changes in biological muscle and highlight design considerations that can inform the development of engineered pennate arrays.

show abstract

A Fluid-Driven Loop-Type Modular Soft Robot with Integrated Locomotion and Manipulation Capability

Sui,

Lai,

et al. 2023

Biomimetics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In nature, some animals, such as snakes and octopuses, use their limited body structure to conduct various complicated tasks not only for locomotion but also for hunting. Their body segments seem to possess the intelligence to adapt to environments and tasks. Inspired by nature, a modular soft robot with integrated locomotion and manipulation abilities is presented in this paper. A soft modular robot is assembled using several homogeneous cubic pneumatic soft actuator units made of silicone rubber. Both a mathematical model and backpropagation neural network are established to describe the nonlinear deformation of the soft actuator unit. The locomotion process of the chain-type soft robot is analyzed to provide a general rhythmic control principle for modular soft robots. A vision sensor is adopted to control the locomotion and manipulation processes of the modular soft robot in a closed loop. The experimental results indicate that the modular soft robot put forward in this paper has both locomotion and manipulation abilities.

show abstract

scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

Contact Info

hi@scite.ai

10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614

Henderson, NV 89052, USA

Blog Terms and Conditions API Terms Privacy Policy Contact Cookie Preferences Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

Made with 💙 for researchers

Part of the Research Solutions Family.

Fluid‐Driven High‐Performance Bionic Artificial Muscle with Adjustable Muscle Architecture

Cited by 3 publications

References 70 publications

Sarcomere‐Inspired Multilayer Artificial Muscle Units for Hyperconfigurable Robotic Applications

Sarcomere‐Inspired Multilayer Artificial Muscle Units for Hyperconfigurable Robotic Applications

Architectural gear ratio depends on actuator spacing in a physical model of pennate muscle

A Fluid-Driven Loop-Type Modular Soft Robot with Integrated Locomotion and Manipulation Capability

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About