Preliminary study of a magnetically driven muscle-like actuator

Abstract

This paper proposes a muscle-like actuator inspired by the agonist-antagonist characteristic of biological muscles. As a preliminary study, we designed an agonist-antagonist actuator with a magnet pair as an agonist, elastic components as an antagonist, and an electromagnetic trigger. The mechanical properties of the magnet pair and the trigger were analyzed using the finite element method. In the experiments to verify the feasibility of the actuator, two types of elastic components (rubber bands and polymer tubes with a specific structure) were respectively utilized. The effectiveness of the actuator was confirmed by experiments.