STAS: An Antagonistic Soft Pneumatic Actuator Assembly for High Torque Output

A review of soft wearable robots that provide active assistance: Trends, common actuation methods, fabrication, and applications

“…They can be constructed from a heat-sealable material such as TPU, which forms an airtight seal when consistent pressure and heat are applied to form a thermal bond between layers (Niiyama et al 2015;Thalman et al 2018; Ang and Yeow 2019). Actuators may be formed from just TPU (or other heat-sealable thin films) layers (Niiyama et al 2015), or they may use a fabric coated on one or both sides with a layer of heatsealable film (Yang and Asbeck 2018;Abrar et al 2019;Thalman et al 2019;Park et al 2019b;Miller-Jackson et al 2019c). As soft components are ideally lightweight and compact, actuators are designed to produce the highest forces possible with the smallest associated volumes (Coyle et al 2018;Cappello et al 2018a).…”

“…As soft components are ideally lightweight and compact, actuators are designed to produce the highest forces possible with the smallest associated volumes (Coyle et al 2018;Cappello et al 2018a). New manufacturing methods optimize this process and reduce the time and level of complexity involved in fabrication (Miller-Jackson et al 2019c). FEA studies have shown promise in providing realistic models for actuator design and optimization by simulating the behavior of soft materials (Holland et al 2017;Coyle et al 2018).…”

“…Fabrication methods of soft exosuit devices are myriad and evolving at a comparable rate to the evolution of the designs themselves (Miller-Jackson et al 2019c). New fabrication methods, and the developments that they facilitate, include the use of sew-free textiles (Yang and Asbeck 2018;Connolly et al 2019), soft lithography for stretchable electronics, and the use of multimaterial 3D printers to integrate several different soft materials into the same part (Yap et al 2016).…”

“…Many designs are cable-driven systems that pull the knee into both flexion and extension (Asbeck et al 2013;Di Natali et al 2019). Other research has been done on using fluidic actuators for knee assistance (Teng et al 2012;Park et al 2014b;Ezzibdeh et al 2019;Miller-Jackson et al 2019c). Issues with pneumatic knee assistance are found in the latency in the actuators firingas mentioned in reference to pneumatic control.…”

A Wearable Soft Robotic Exoskeleton for Hip Flexion Rehabilitation

“…While useful, PAMs may be limited by stroke length, since their motion depends on contraction. A larger range of motion may be afforded by PRAs (pneumatic rotary actuators) ( Sridar et al, 2017 ; Chung et al, 2018 ; Tiana M. Miller-Jackson et al, 2019 ; Veale et al, 2019 ; Fang et al, 2020 ; Park et al, 2020 ; Sridar et al, 2020 ; Veale et al, 2021 ), a type of SPA which produces rotary motion. J. Chung et al presented the PRA-driven Exoboot for ankle motion assistance and reported a maximum torque of 39 Nm at a supply pressure of 483kPa and an ankle angle of 60° ( Chung et al, 2018 ).…”