6 accepted papers
Artificial muscles have been developed for various input power sources. Among them, thermally driven actuators can be easily actuated at a low voltage without an additional device using the Joule heating. Therefore, these actuators can be considered suitable for developing lightweight robots. Shape
Shape memory alloy actuators (SMA) are widely used in robots owing to their flexibility and light weight. However, there is a drawback in that SMAs need to be used as a bundle owing to their lower force density than the motor. In addition, SMAs require continuous current to maintain a contracted sta
Twisted-coiled polymer actuators (TCA) have many interesting properties that show potentials for making high performance bionic devices. This letter presents a long short term memory (LSTM) model to predict the behavior of an antagonistic joint driven by hybrid TCA bundles made from Spandex and nylo
Super-coiled polymer (SCP) artificial muscles have many interesting properties that show potentials for making high performance bionic devices. To realize human-like robotic devices from this type of actuator, it is important for the SCP driven mechanisms to achieve human-like performance, such as c…
This paper presents a 1-link robotic arm that is antagonistically driven by one pair of a high performance super-coiled polymer actuators with an embedded controller. The actuator which is made from Spandex and nylon fibers is low-cost, easy to fabricate and light-weight. Moreover, it can generate l…
This paper presents a fabric actuator consisting of ordinary polymer fibers, conductive fibers, and twisted and coiled soft actuators (TCAs). Previous studies have developed a Spandex TCA (STCA) that is driven at a lower temperature than the conventional Nylon TCA and exhibits greater actuation stra…