Pluripotent Fabrication of Muscles, Bones, Joints, and Tendons Using McKibben-Type Artificial Muscles

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to engineer the mechanism of body design using pluripotency, which produces various functional elements from the same cell as in animals. As a first step toward imitating the pluripotent fabrication of animal bodies, we propose a design method for constructing a functional robotic body by extracting various properties from the same material. The material used in this paper is McKibben-type artificial muscle, which has been widely used in the field of robotics research. In this paper, we show that by programming the local properties of a long McKibben-type artificial muscle, each part of the muscle can exhibit various material properties when compressed air is introduced to construct a structure or a part of a robot body.