The McKibben artificial muscle, which is one of soft actuators and consists of a rubber tube and a sleeve of reinforcement fibers, has the features of flexibility and lightweight. For increasing the convenience of the McKibben artificial muscle, attaching the sensor function to the artificial muscle is required. However, general rigid sensors hinder the advantage of the McKibben artificial muscle. Therefore, smart artificial muscles integrated with sensors have been developed.
In this paper, we describe the fabrication method of artificial muscles having enameled wires forming coiled-shape and working as both reinforcement fibers for actuation and a displacement sensor. When the artificial muscle is driven, since the shape of the coil changes, the displacement of the artificial muscle can be estimated by measuring the inductance of the coil. The fabrication process of the smart artificial muscles using a braiding machine is proposed. By this fabrication process, it is possible to change the braiding angle of the reinforcement fibers, and both the contraction-type and the extension-type artificial muscles with the sensor function can be manufactured by the same process. In addition, on the contraction-type smart artificial muscle, for increasing the sensor output, magnetic fluid is used as the working fluid.
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