2019 article
Bio-inspired orderly recruitment valve for fluidic articial muscles
BIOINSPIRATION, BIOMIMETICS, AND BIOREPLICATION IX, Vol. 10965.
The objective of this research is to design and analyze a novel hydraulic orderly recruitment valve (ORV) for actuation of fluidic artificial muscle (FAM) systems. More recently artificial muscles are gaining popularity due to their increased efficiency by employing strategies such as variable muscle recruitment. Variable recruitment employs selective recruitment of muscles depending on the load, akin to mammalian muscles. However, existing active variable recruitment systems use as many valves as the muscle actuators in the system. The proposed design of the ORV enables orderly recruitment of multiple FAMs in the system using a single valve. Modeling and analysis of the ORV is carried out to characterize its behavior and understand the dynamics of the system. The analytical model of the ORV is simulated along with an equivalent multi-valve setup to compare the abilities of both the systems to track a prescribed trajectory.