<p>The field of soft robotics has gained exponential interest over the past few years. Soft actuators in particular have seen a variety of applications in different fields like robotic surgery, industrial grade pick-and-place robots, wearable technologies and human-machine interfaces. There are many different candidate technologies for artificial muscle soft actuation like hydraulic and pneumatic systems, shape memory alloys (SMA), dielectric elastomers, twisted nylon etc. While hydraulic and pneumatic actuators are quite common, they have their disadvantages like bulky components for pumps and valves which limit their practical implementation. Dielectric elastomers are a promising soft actuator technology that overcomes these disadvantages, but they have high voltage requirements and lower force outputs. Here, we present an alternative methodology of using a hybrid artificial muscle that integrates different soft actuator technologies so that the advantages of one overcomes the disadvantages of the other. This hybrid approach intimately combines both dielectric elastomer actuators (DEA) and SMA wires in a single device. This low-profile actuator has simultaneously both larger force and stroke than what could be realized by either SMA or DEA actuators alone. Unlike a conventional DEA where the electrostatic forces drive the actuation of the artificial muscle, the SMA wires of the hybrid muscle perform the initial actuation by bringing the DEA electrodes into close proximity with each other. This allows the electrostatic forces of the DEAs to then close at substantially lower voltages, after which the SMA wires are turned off in order to reduce power consumption and lower thermal buildup. This results in a two-fold improvement of actuation stroke for the same force at only half the operating voltage. This hybrid muscle demonstrates a unique actuator-level integrated methodology that elevates necessary soft robotic performance metrics for practical applications in real-world environments.</p>

Hybrid Artificial Muscle Actuator

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/SMASIS/SMASIS2021/volume/85499

ASME 2021 Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems (SMASIS2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.