Soft actuators inspired by a muscle-cross-bridge

Soft actuators have a high potential for safe human-robot interaction and the creative design of flexible robots. Making soft actuators act like human muscles has been a sustained goal of researchers worldwide. So far, significant progress has been made in flexibility, deformation amplitude, and variable stiffness of soft actuators. However, there are still deficiencies in output force and force retention. Human muscle has ideal force performance, mainly due to muscle cross-bridge structures' motion. Inspired by cross-bridges, this paper proposes a new folding design of soft actuators driven by negative pressure fluid. Meanwhile, we establish a theoretical model to predict such an actuator's output force and displacement under given pressures. Next, five actuators are fabricated using three different materials and evaluated on a test platform. The test results reveal that one generates the maximum pull force of 1125.9N and the maximum push force of 818.2N, and another's full output force reaches 600 times its weight. Finally, demonstrative experiments are conducted extensively, including stretching, contracting, clamping, single-arm power assistance, and underwater movement. They show our actuators' characteristics of a large output force, strong force retention, two-way working, and even generating human-muscle-like explosive force. The valuable properties are lacking in the existing soft actuators.