Artificial muscles give soft robots superpowers (LiveScience)

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November 27, 2017

Soft robotics has made leaps and bounds over the last decade as researchers around the world have experimented with different materials and designs to allow once rigid, jerky machines to bend and flex in ways that mimic and can interact more naturally with living organisms. However, increased flexibility and dexterity has a trade-off of reduced strength, as softer materials are generally not as strong or resilient as inflexible ones, which limits their use.

Now, researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created origami-inspired artificial muscles that add strength to soft robots, allowing them to lift objects that are up to 1,000 times their own weight using only air or water pressure. The study will be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"We were very surprised by how strong the actuators [aka, "muscles"] were. We expected they'd have a higher maximum functional weight than ordinary soft robots, but we didn't expect a thousand-fold increase. It's like giving these robots superpowers," says Daniela Rus, Ph.D., the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and one of the senior authors of the paper.

"Artificial muscle-like actuators are one of the most important grand challenges in all of engineering," adds Rob Wood, Ph.D., corresponding author of the paper and Founding Core Faculty member of the Wyss Institute, who is also the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). "Now that we have created actuators with properties similar to natural muscle, we can imagine building almost any robot for almost any task."
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more: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-artificial-muscles-soft-robots-superpowers.html#jCp



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