For designing the assistive wearable rehabilitation robots, it is challenging to design the robot as energy efficient because the actuators have to be capable of overcoming human loads such as gravity of the body and spastic torque continuously during the assistance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel design of soft artificial muscle that utilizes shape memory alloy (SMA) spring actuators with pre-detwinning process. The SMA spring was fabricated through a process called pre-detwinning, which enhances the linearity of the SMA spring in martensite phase and unpowered restoring force, which is called passive force. The fabricated SMA spring can contract >60%. Finally, the soft wearable robot that can assist not only the gravitational torque exerted on the elbow by passive force, but also the elbow movements with active force was designed with a soft artificial muscle. A soft artificial muscle consists of the bundles of pre-detwinned SMA springs integrated with the stretchable coolant vessel. The stiffness of the muscle was measured as 1125 N/m in martensite phase and 1732 N/m in austenite phase. In addition, the muscle showed great actuation frequency performances, the bandwidth of which was measured as 0.5 Hz. The proposed wearable mechanism can fully compensate the gravitational torque for all the angles in passive mode. In addition, the proposed mechanism can produce high torque up to 3.5 Nm and movements in active mode.
Keywords: artificial muscles; assistive robots; shape memory alloys; soft actuators; wearable robots.