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Soft Pneumatic Actuator Fascicles for High Force and Reliability

Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are found in mobile robots, assistive wearable devices, and rehabilitative technologies. While soft actuators have been one of the most crucial elements of technology leading the development of the soft robotics field, they fall short of force output and bandwidth req...

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Autores principales: Robertson, Matthew A., Sadeghi, Hamed, Florez, Juan Manuel, Paik, Jamie
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5346960/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28289573
http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/soro.2016.0029
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author Robertson, Matthew A.
Sadeghi, Hamed
Florez, Juan Manuel
Paik, Jamie
author_facet Robertson, Matthew A.
Sadeghi, Hamed
Florez, Juan Manuel
Paik, Jamie
author_sort Robertson, Matthew A.
collection PubMed
description Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are found in mobile robots, assistive wearable devices, and rehabilitative technologies. While soft actuators have been one of the most crucial elements of technology leading the development of the soft robotics field, they fall short of force output and bandwidth requirements for many tasks. In addition, other general problems remain open, including robustness, controllability, and repeatability. The SPA-pack architecture presented here aims to satisfy these standards of reliability crucial to the field of soft robotics, while also improving the basic performance capabilities of SPAs by borrowing advantages leveraged ubiquitously in biology; namely, the structured parallel arrangement of lower power actuators to form the basis of a larger and more powerful actuator module. An SPA-pack module consisting of a number of smaller SPAs will be studied using an analytical model and physical prototype. Experimental measurements show an SPA pack to generate over 112 N linear force, while the model indicates the benefit of parallel actuator grouping over a geometrically equivalent single SPA scale as an increasing function of the number of individual actuators in the group. For a module of four actuators, a 23% increase in force production over a volumetrically equivalent single SPA is predicted and validated, while further gains appear possible up to 50%. These findings affirm the advantage of utilizing a fascicle structure for high-performance soft robotic applications over existing monolithic SPA designs. An example of high-performance soft robotic platform will be presented to demonstrate the capability of SPA-pack modules in a complete and functional system.
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spelling pubmed-53469602017-03-13 Soft Pneumatic Actuator Fascicles for High Force and Reliability Robertson, Matthew A. Sadeghi, Hamed Florez, Juan Manuel Paik, Jamie Soft Robot Original Articles Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are found in mobile robots, assistive wearable devices, and rehabilitative technologies. While soft actuators have been one of the most crucial elements of technology leading the development of the soft robotics field, they fall short of force output and bandwidth requirements for many tasks. In addition, other general problems remain open, including robustness, controllability, and repeatability. The SPA-pack architecture presented here aims to satisfy these standards of reliability crucial to the field of soft robotics, while also improving the basic performance capabilities of SPAs by borrowing advantages leveraged ubiquitously in biology; namely, the structured parallel arrangement of lower power actuators to form the basis of a larger and more powerful actuator module. An SPA-pack module consisting of a number of smaller SPAs will be studied using an analytical model and physical prototype. Experimental measurements show an SPA pack to generate over 112 N linear force, while the model indicates the benefit of parallel actuator grouping over a geometrically equivalent single SPA scale as an increasing function of the number of individual actuators in the group. For a module of four actuators, a 23% increase in force production over a volumetrically equivalent single SPA is predicted and validated, while further gains appear possible up to 50%. These findings affirm the advantage of utilizing a fascicle structure for high-performance soft robotic applications over existing monolithic SPA designs. An example of high-performance soft robotic platform will be presented to demonstrate the capability of SPA-pack modules in a complete and functional system. Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 2017-03-01 2017-03-01 /pmc/articles/PMC5346960/ /pubmed/28289573 http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/soro.2016.0029 Text en © Matthew A. Robertson et al., 2017; Published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. This Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.
spellingShingle Original Articles
Robertson, Matthew A.
Sadeghi, Hamed
Florez, Juan Manuel
Paik, Jamie
Soft Pneumatic Actuator Fascicles for High Force and Reliability
title Soft Pneumatic Actuator Fascicles for High Force and Reliability
title_full Soft Pneumatic Actuator Fascicles for High Force and Reliability
title_fullStr Soft Pneumatic Actuator Fascicles for High Force and Reliability
title_full_unstemmed Soft Pneumatic Actuator Fascicles for High Force and Reliability
title_short Soft Pneumatic Actuator Fascicles for High Force and Reliability
title_sort soft pneumatic actuator fascicles for high force and reliability
topic Original Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5346960/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28289573
http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/soro.2016.0029
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