Fluid-Driven High-Performance Bionic Artificial Muscle with Adjustable Muscle Architecture

High-performance artificial muscle is always the pursuit of researchers for robotics. Herein, a bionic artificial muscle is reported called ExoMuscle mimicking the sarcomere in skeletal muscle with a bio-inspired structure to contract myofilaments enabling the artificial muscle to mimic the architecture of muscle such as parallel, fusiform, convergent, and pennation and beyond the performance of skeletal muscle. The reported actuators excel in various aspects compared with skeletal muscle including actuation stress (0.41-0.9 MPa), strain (50%), optimal length, velocity-independence output, power density (10.94 kW kg(-1)), and efficiency (69.11%). With its own adjustable pennation architecture, it achieves variable actuation stress up to 0.9 MPa meanwhile maintaining high efficiency. Furthermore, ExoMuscle highly conforms to the anatomical complexity of the human body to cooperate with skeletal muscles closely opening the door for bio-robotics, especially wearable robots.

Automated summary

A bionic artificial muscle called ExoMuscle has been developed to mimic the structure and performance of skeletal muscle. It outperforms skeletal muscle in terms of actuation stress, strain, optimal length, velocity-independence output, power density, and efficiency. With its adjustable pennation architecture, it can achieve variable actuation stress while maintaining high efficiency. ExoMuscle closely conforms to the anatomical complexity of the human body, making it suitable for applications in bio-robotics, especially wearable robots.