Design and Characterization of a Herringbone Actuator with Variable Chamber Height

Soft actuators have since been widely recognized for specific tasks due to their advantages against rigid robots such as lightweight and safe human/product interaction. However, they are widely characterized for single-directional bending thereby limiting their application in the same way. As a proposed solution to this course, we developed an actuator with dual directional bending capability by further optimizing the herringbone-structured design through integration of chamber height variation to better improve its performance. Prototypes of the actuator were created, and subsequent characterization experiments were done to determine the validity of these optimizations on actuator performance. Result of the study shows promising results on the novel design's performance output for both dual directional bending and force characterizations as induced by the structural optimization of the chamber height.