Proposal of an extremely lightweight soft actuator using plastic films with a pleated structure

Abstract

Safety is important for human friendly robots which mechanically touch humans or move around humans. This paper proposes an extremely lightweight soft actuator for aiming at realization of human friendly robots. The proposed actuator is made of pleated plastic thin films. An advantage of the proposed actuator is that various motions are easily generated by changing the pleated patterns. The basic characteristics of the proposed actuator are shown through some experimental results and the applications of the proposed actuator are described.