細径人工筋肉からなる織布状ソフトメカニズムの試作と評価

抄録

Pneumatic artificial muscles have some advantages. Especially, the flexibility contributes to compose novel mechanisms. The flexibility of pneumatic artificial muscles releases us from the spatially strict design. It could actualize compact mechanisms made of fewer parts. The thin artificial muscles we developed are more flexible than conventional McKibben muscles. Authors succeeded in manufacturing novel soft mechanisms that are made of only woven artificial muscles and strings. We called this mechanism active textile. In this paper, we report a result for driving experiment of active textiles that are woven in three foundation woven from thin artificial muscles and some strings. Deformation types of active textiles are changed by woven structures. Those woven structures differ by a pattern of crossing position. In addition to that, woofs’ characteristics such as cross-sectional shape, bending stiffness and elasticity determine the characteristic of a textile. The active textile changes to a contraction mechanism by gap of woofs, additionally it changes to a bending mechanism by the ratio of short path in front and back sides of textile. Active textiles bend in two directions. One of them is caused by contraction of artificial muscles, and other one is caused by expansion. It determines which bending dominants by woven structures and woof yarns.