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Bionic Arm With Muscle Emulation
Gugo writes "German based company FESTO has develop a bionic arm that uses muscle emulation,(video included) with a product called 'fluidic muscle.' It works like a normal animal-human muscle but moved by air inside.
This new type of prosthetic offers rapid response, small size, simple assembly and ease of control.
On their website they show the range of fluidic muscles with a car race simulator."
for giving one's self "the stranger"
We have the technology.
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I would only buy one if it could break people's arms while arm wrestling
Wow... even a woman should be able to use it!
Two fully functioning arms sitting next to each other in the video..... and no high fives?! What a waste of technology!
...robotic handjob.
Festo does good work. They're an industrial automation company, and they do demos like this for promotional purposes. Check out their videos on YouTube.
The innovation here is not "fluidic muscles". It's their piezoelectric proportional valves. It's been possible for years to do precision control of pneumatics. Twenty years ago, "Pneumatic Valves, Inc." in Palo Alto was doing control like that. But older proportional valves were big and expensive, with a voice coil actuator on the end of a spool valve. Festo has miniaturized the technology with their piezoelectric valves.
Pneumatic systems have traditionally been either force actuators or devices driven to a limit stop. Fine position control was the domain of hydraulics. This is changing. For pneumatic systems, if the valves can be brought close to the actuator, the valves are fast, position sensors are used, and the control system is well designed, the system becomes quite controllable. That's what Festo is demonstrating here.
You can also do some things with pneumatics you can't do well with electrical drive, such as create springs with variable spring constants. Muscles can be usefully modeled as spring-damper systems, where the spring constant, zero point, and damping constant are all controllable. This can be emulated with electrical actuators, but emulating a spring in software requires high-powered actuators and loses energy. Legged running work needs something like a variable spring, and pneumatics are currently the closest thing to muscles available.