Scientists Have Built Robot Muscles That Can Lift 1,000 Times Their Own Weight (qz.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) announced today (Nov. 27) that they've created robotic "muscles" that can lift up to 1,000 times their own weight. The simple objects are constructed out of metal or plastic "skeletons" that are covered in either a liquid or air, and then sealed in plastic or fabric "skins." The muscle pulls taught when a vacuum is created inside the skin, and goes slack when the vacuum is released. By folding the skeletons in different ways, the vacuum can pull the muscle in different directions. "Vacuum-based muscles have a lower risk of rupture, failure, and damage, and they don't expand when they're operating, so you can integrate them into closer-fitting robots on the human body," Daniel Vogt, a research engineer at the Wyss Institute, said in a release.

These new structures are also surprisingly cheap. As they don't require anything other than water or air to move them, the researchers told Harvard that a single muscle can be built in about 10 minutes, for less than $1. (Obviously, there'd still be a cost for the vacuum or whatever is being used to change the pressure of the muscles.)

Comments

The disadvantage of vacuum pressure

[Solandri]

. "Vacuum-based muscles have a lower risk of rupture, failure, and damage, and they don't expand when they're operating, so you can integrate them into closer-fitting robots on the human body,"

The disadvantage of basing it on vacuum pressure is that their force is limited to ambient pressure. For sea level that's 14.7 PSI, or about 10 Newtons per square cm of muscle cross sectional area. The typical human muscle can pull with a force of about 35 N/cm^2. So these artificial muscles are considerably weaker than biological muscles. Sorry all you Mechwarrior fans.

It might turn out to be useful in underwater applications. Pressure underwater increases by 1 atmosphere approximately every 10 meters of depth, so it wouldn't take much depth to greatly exceed human musclepower. The problem might actually be being able to pull a vacuum under those pressures.

Incidentally, air pressure is also what they use to make zero-g weightlifting exercise equipment.

Re:1,000 times their own weight!

[BlueStrat]

No, the catch is they aren't muscles. They're just structures held in place by air pressure. This is what happens when you're too specialized (or just running after DARPA money). It's only pneumatics/hydraulics. Anyone who has ever vacuum packed their food or clothing has created one of their 'robot muscles'. Granted their's have more complicated shapes, but that doesn't make them novel.

Many absolutely ingenious pneumatically-driven actuators were designed and used over the decades quite widely in many, many areas of industry, manufacturing, and defense for myriads of applications and uses all the way up through the 1950s-60s. Pneumatic technology of all sorts was one of the "cool" and "in" things in the early 1900s, many novel examples winding up being featured in "futuristic" displays in World Fairs during the period.

I say this to point out that these boys (bless their hearts) might be trying to reinvent the wheel, here.

Sometimes, reading these types of articles that are all breathless over something like pneumatics, or hydraulics in the case of a fluid-based system, I wonder if maybe modern-day scientific researchers and scientists miss prior work in some field they're in simply because they only research prior work that's been digitized and made available online while missing the huge amount of research and documentation that still exists only on paper and/or possibly microfiche that require relatively large amounts of man-hours to search and read.

Strat