A bundled staggering patterned pneumatic muscle actuator for improved working efficiency

Recently many new actuators have been developed in order to overcome the limitations of conventional actuators. The pneumatic artificial muscle actuator (PMA) is one of the typical examples. Although many studies have been conducted on the single PMA, there are still many limitations of the single PMA operation. The typical problems are low efficiency and limited force output. In order to overcome these limitations, the parallel band PMA (PPMA) consisting of a bundle of PMAs has been developed instead of the single PMA. However, due to the simple actuator driving principle, the parallel PMA causes another problem such as an interference between each PMAs placed side by side. In this paper, we proposed a new bundled staggering patterned pneumatic artificial muscle actuator (SPMA) to resolve the interference problem. The SPMA consists of a bundle of staggered pattern actuators that ensures the large actuation force with a small form factor. To verify the performance of the proposed SPMA, output force and operating range have been compared to those of the existing PPMA by conducting simulation and experiments.