Azimuthal Shear Deformation of a Novel Soft Fiber-reinforced Rotary Pneumatic Actuator

The Elastic Inflatable Actuators (EIAs) has several advantages such as the inherent compliance due to the body comprised of a soft materials such as silicone. Among them, the soft fiber reinforced actuator is based on the principle that the expansion of enclosure and constraint of fiber pattern lead to a desired operation. While lots of researches on the actuator has been attributed to linear and bending motions, however, there are only few researches on rotary, or torsional, motions. In this paper, we propose a new actuator that causes azimuthal deformation due to restriction of anisotropically distributed fiber element along the radial direction and expansion of the hyper elastic material. Structure design of the actuator and a fabrication process of the actuator are presented. Subsequently, FEM simulation and experiment are executed to measure rotation angles of the actuators corresponding to the applied pressure.