Sign in to our website and become an InMoov member. It will allow you to post message, pictures, and share with others InMoov builders. It's just one click away!
Username or Email Address
Password
Remember Me
Alexander Semochkin posted an update 9 years, 2 months ago
My experiments with polymer artificial muscles: the movement of the InMoov robot finger.
One polymer artificial muscle can pick up 200g load with contraction 1 cm.
Cool that you are experimenting this also!! I’m glad to see some other tests. With the few tests I did with polymer muscles, I was a bit disapointed about the speed, and precision. Also as results due to the wire temperature, the polymer was getting less and less responsive and brownish. Do you get good results, when you have two muscles, one for extention and one for retraction?
These muscles have no good control technology yet. It is difficult to organize the rapid heating and cooling. What characteristics of muscles were in your tests : resistance and the material of the wire, the voltage for muscle contraction, and what electronics did you use for that?
Texas scientists claims that these muscles do not lose their properties during operation. My muscles have this property, it seems to me.
The main drawback of this technology is the high values of voltage and current for heating.
Its been at least a year, I did these tests. The polymere wire was 0,8mm. The electric wire resistance was Nickel Chrome 0,3mm. I would vary the temperature of the resistance using a 220v light shader directly connected to the resistance. (dangerous tests…) So I haven’t calculated what Amps was drawn by the resistance. The length of the expended muscle was approximately 15cm with a weight attached to it. (can’t remember the weight, I might have tried different objects)