光ファイバを編み込んだ変位推定機能を有するMcKibben 型人工筋の提案と試作

抄録

A McKibben artificial muscle consists of a rubber tube and a sleeve which is knitted fibers. In order to make the artificial muscle more useful, researches for embedding sensors into the artificial muscle were carried out, however most of them were realized by integrating the actuator and the sensor which were fabricated separately.

In this report, we propose a McKibben artificial muscle with an optical fiber in the sleeve for detecting the displacement. This optical fiber works as the essential element for both actuating and the sensing. In addition, it can be integrated during fabrication of the McKibben artificial muscle by a braider. The amount of propagating light in the optical fiber varies with curvature changing of the fiber. Therefore, the optical fiber in the sleeve has possibility to detect the displacement of the artificial muscle. The prototype artificial muscle with the optical fiber was fabricated by the braider. Experimentally correlation between the sensor output from the optical fiber and the displacement of the artificial muscle was confirmed.