Abstract
Pneumatic actuators are expected to be usable in special environments such as dusty, explosive atmospheres and strong magnetic fields. In our laboratory, a pneumatic wobble motor that has air chambers made of polyimide films has been developed. Polyimide film has excellent mechanical and thermal properties among resins. Wobble motor extracts rotational motion from an oscillating wobble ring. However, previous pneumatic wobble motors require a spring mechanism around the wobble ring to restrain it, resulting in a large size in the diameter direction. In this study, to make motors smaller, two functions were assigned to the air chamber, which serves as the driving source for the motor. These functions are to act as a spring and to fix the wobble ring. As a result, the mass and volume of fabricated motor were reduced by 90% and 78%, respectively, compared with the previous motor. A maximum speed was 0.84 rps and a maximum torque was 7.23 mNm. The performance was higher than that of the previous one.
