Proposal of pneumatic rubber muscles with Shape-Memory Polymer reinforcement fibers realizing desirable motion

Pneumatic rubber actuators have advantages, light weigh, low cost, high safety and so on. Most of them have reinforcement fibers in their rubber body to realize anisotropic deformation for desirable motion when pneumatic pressure is applied. Once the actuator is fabricated, its motion type, bending, contracting, or extending, is determined uniquely. In this study, Shape Memory Polymer (SMP) fibers are utilized as reinforcement fibers for pneumatic rubber actuators. Owing to function of SMP, shape of the actuators can be varied, then the motion of the actuator can be changed easily. In this report, we focuse on two kinds of pneumatic rubber artificial muscles, one is a straight fiber type muscle and the other is a McKibben type muscle, they generate linear motion in axial direction. SMP fibers are embedded in these artificial muscles as reinforcement fibers, then by changing its shape by SMP, these realize not only simple linear motion but also torsional motion or extensional-flexional motion.