Segmentation of a soft body and its bending performance using thin mckibben muscle

Abstract

In recent years, the soft actuator has been extensively developed in robotic research. This type of robot is expected to work with human due to its excellent performance while it is lightweight, has higher power output, flexibility, and adaptability advantages. Due to this factor, thin McKibben muscle actuator is of interest as an actuator for this research for bending application. Current study on actuator mainly focused on the new method of design, modelling, and control by manipulating shape, material, and braided for bending performance, and it is rarely studied on the optimisation of existing technology which could also give high performance with low-cost and time. This paper presents the segmentation of a soft body and its bending performance using thin McKibben muscle. Herein, we report a soft body using thin McKibben muscle actuator integrated with knitted thread as the pulley. The knitted point was used to divide the length of the actuator into a variant of length segment. This segment length technique was able to produce high bending angle output of 42° compared to the unsegmented length of 40°, increasing 1.0 times to the original value.