Abstract
Muscle-like actuators can be composed by connecting together individual contractile modules in a variety of configurations. This chapter shows that by including more or fewer modules and varying how they are connected the designer can tailor the configuration to the application in precise ways and produce actuators in a range of form factors. As more of the units are recruited, or brought into the active state, the muscle-like actuator contracts, imparting motion to the robot. New algorithms are needed to determine how best to recruit, and these algorithms must consider the system dynamics of the muscle-like actuator, which will depend on how they are configured, unlike traditional actuators which are easily modeled by linear filters.
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Notes
- 1.
I first recall hearing this point in a lecture at Vanderbilt University given by Michael Goldfarb; I do not recall seeing it stated explicitly in an extant work.
- 2.
As skeletal muscles can only contract in response to a stimulus and not extend, the term “contraction” is commonly used for muscle-like actuators, even though not all underlying technologies necessarily have this limitation. Due to the biological inspiration, many are contractile only in the final implementation and must be used antagonistically.
- 3.
One advantage of muscle-like actuators composed of discrete units is that “muscles” can be created containing both mono-articular and poly-articular “heads”, as with human skeletal muscle, but this will not be discussed in this work.
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Schultz, J. (2021). Muscle-Like Actuators and Their System Dynamics. In: Beckerle, P., Sharbafi, M.A., Verstraten, T., Pott, P.P., Seyfarth, A. (eds) Novel Bioinspired Actuator Designs for Robotics. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 888. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40886-2_7
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