Artificial muscles inspired by the Japanese folding technique of origami could give robots the power to lift up to 1,000 times their own weight.
US researchers have crafted a cheap new material that will let the machines carry out smoother, less rigid, and more human-like movements.
The advance offers a leap forward in the field of soft robotics, which are fast replacing older generations of automatons.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have crafted cheap, artificial muscles for robots that give them the power to lift up to 1,000 times their own weight
The breakthrough was made by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The muscles, known as actuators, are built on a framework of metal coils or plastic sheets, and each muscle costs around 75p ($1) to make.
Their origami inspiration derives from a zig-zag structure that some of the muscles employ, allowing them to contract and expand as commanded, using vacuum-powered air or water pressure.
The skeleton can be a spring, an origami-like folded structure, or any solid structure with hinged or elastic voids and the structural geometry determines the muscle’s motion.
‘It’s like giving these robots superpowers,’ said senior author Daniela Rus, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Possible uses include expandable space habitats on Mars, miniature surgical devices, wearable robotic exoskeletons, deep-sea exploration devices or even transformable architecture.
‘Artificial muscle-like actuators are one of the most important grand challenges in all of engineering,’ said co-author Rob Wood, professor of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard University.
‘Now that we have created actuators with properties similar to natural muscle, we can imagine building almost any robot for almost any task.’
Researchers built dozens of muscles, using metal springs, packing foam or plastic in a range of shapes and sizes.
They created muscles that can contract down to 10 per cent of their original size, lift a delicate flower off the ground, and twist into a coil, all simply by sucking the air out of them.
The skeleton can be a spring, an origami-like folded structure, or any solid structure with hinged or elastic voids and the the structural geometry determines the muscle’s motion
The artificial muscles can generate about six times more force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle can, and are also incredibly lightweight.
A .09 ounce (2.6 gram) muscle can lift an object weighing 6.6 pounds (three kilograms), which is the equivalent of a mallard duck lifting a car.
According to co-author Daniel Vogt, research engineer at the Wyss Institute, the vacuum-based muscles ‘have a lower risk of rupture, failure, and damage, and they don’t expand when they’re operating, so you can integrate them into closer-fitting robots on the human body.’
The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
A full report on the study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.