Sarcomere-Inspired Multilayer Artificial Muscle Units for Hyperconfigurable Robotic Applications

Abstract

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.