Design Principles for Improved Fatigue Life of High-Strain Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

Abstract The fatigue life of pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) is a limitation to the development of reliability-intensive applications of soft robots in fields such as medical robotics, transportation, and industrial manufacturing. This article aims at improving the fatigue life of PAMs by (1) providing design principles for durable PAMs under high strains and (2) demonstrating these design principles by developing a representative optimal extensible pneumatic muscle (EPM) in the context of a soft surgical robot case study. Representative performance requirements are derived from an image-guided surgical robot taken as a case study. An experimental design study over relevant EPM geometries reveals three basic fatigue principles governing the failure of PAMs: fatigue limit, abrasion wear, and Hertz contact stress. Using these principles, a new extensible pneumatic muscle made of a silicone tube and a continuous orthotropic restraining sleeve is designed and characterized in terms of performance and fati...

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