PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.
This paper investigates the effect of resistive forces that arise in compressed fluidic artificial muscles (FAMs) within a variable recruitment bundle. Much like our skeletal muscle organs that selectively recruit different number of motor fibers depending on the load demand, a variable recruitment FAM bundle adaptively activates the minimum number of motor units (MUs) to increase its overall efficiency. A variable recruitment bundle may operate in different recruitment states (RSs) during which only a subset of the FAMs within a bundle are activated. In such cases, a difference in strain occurs between active FAMs and inactive/low-pressure FAMs. This strain difference results in the compression of inactive/lowpressure FAMs causing them to exert a resistive force opposing the force output of active FAMs. This paper presents experimental measurements for a FAM for both tensile and compressive regions. The data is used to simulate the overall force-strain space of a variable recruitment bundle for when resistive force effects are neglected and when they are included. Counterintuitively, an initial decrease in bundle free strain is observed when a transition to a higher RS is made due to the presence of resistive forces. We call this phenomenon the free strain gradient reversal of a variable recruitment bundle. The paper is concluded with a discussion of the implications of this phenomenon.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.
The alert did not successfully save. Please try again later.
Jeong Yong Kim, Nicholas Mazzoleni, Matthew Bryant, "Free strain gradient reversal of a variable recruitment fluidic artificial muscle bundle," Proc. SPIE 11586, Bioinspiration, Biomimetics, and Bioreplication XI, 115860L (22 March 2021); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2583213