An octopus arm with a flexible structure and no rigid skeleton shows a high degree of freedom and flexibility. These excellent features are suitable for working in an environment having fragile and unknown-shaped objects. Therefore, a soft robot arm resembling an octopus arm can be useful as a harvesting machine without damaging crops in the agricultural field, as a rehabilitation apparatus in the welfare field, as a safe surgery tool in the medical field, and so on. Unlike industrial robots, to consider the applications of the soft robot arm, the instructions for it relating to a task cannot in many cases be given as a numerical value, and the motion according to an operator’s sense and intent is useful. This paper describes the design and feedback control of a soft master-slave robot system. The system is configured with two soft rubber machines; one is a slave machine that is the soft robot arm mimicking the muscle arrangement of the octopus arm by pneumatic artificial muscles, and the other is a master machine that gives the target motion to the slave machine. Both are configured with soft materials. The slave machine has an actuating part and a sensing part, it can perform bending and torsional motions, and these motions are estimated by the sensing part with threads that connect to wire encoders. The master machine is almost the same configuration, but it has no actuating part. The slave machine is driven according to the deformation of the master machine. We confirmed experimentally that the slave machine followed the master machine that was deformed by an operator.

We have fabricated a probe sensor. This sensor is for high precision coordinate measuring machines, surface roughness measuring tools, or scanning probe microscopes (SPM). This sensor consists of a rod vibrating in the axial direction. The longitudinal vibration was excited and also detected by PZT thin film. The PZT thin film was fabricated by a hydrothermal method. The hydrothermal method uses the reaction process in hot and high pressure aqueous solutions. We made a 27.8-mm long sensor. Its resonance frequency was 116 kHz. The sensitivity and resolution were evaluated by experiments. We succeeded in oscillating the rod and detecting the contact.

This manuscript explains the employment of flexible actuators to act as a soft robot and transporting agent to assist medical X-ray examinations. Although soft robots from silicone material can be transparence and a human compliance used as medical assistive devices, soft robots have some problems: they tend to be sluggish, have long and imprecise gait trajectories, and need their control parameters to be adjusted for motion diversion. A soft robot with omnidirectional locomotion has been created, one that has a combination of pneumatic rubber legs that form a soft robot platform and an associated hardware setup. Tests have confirmed its omnidirectional locomotion ability; it has a maximum speed of 6.90 mm/s in forward locomotion and a maximum payload of 70 g. These features indicate that the robot can be used as a medical assistive device for fluoroscopy examinations.

A new compact pneumatic cylinder with a micro position sensor, named intelligent pneumatic cylinder was developed. It consists of a piston rod with stripe codes and a micro optical MEMS encoder. The stripe codes were fabricated through a selective oxidization process by irradiating with a YAG laser. The cylinder realizes a compact pneumatic position servo system. The servo experimental results were very promising. The piston rod position is easily controlled at any desired position between both ends of the rod stroke. This paper reports also an adaptive servo algorithm which was newly developed for stepping positioning of the intelligent pneumatic cylinder, realizing about 0.1 to 1 mm positioning accuracy without overshooting

The McKibben artificial muscle is a pneumatic soft actuator consisting of a rubber tube, with fibers covering it. In this study, we propose a new fabrication process to easily realize twisting artificial muscles by utilizing braiding technology and water-soluble fibers based on the McKibben artificial muscle. In the braiding process, half of the sleeve fibers of the artificial muscle are substituted with water-soluble fibers. However, the water-soluble fibers are removed by placing the muscle in warm water to realize a twisting motion. By changing the direction of the fibers, artificial muscles that twist clockwise or counterclockwise can be produced. We believe that the establishment of such a simple and efficient fabrication process will promote to the practical application of artificial muscles.

A McKibben artificial muscle is a fluid-driven soft actuator comprising sleeve fibres and rubber tube. However, as typical bulky and rigid displacement sensors are unsuitable as sensor elements in soft actuators, displacement sensing is challenging for the McKibben artificial muscle. Therefore, we propose an optical fibre-based smart artificial muscle (OSAM) to estimate self-displacement from the bending loss of the optical fibre used as the sleeve fibre. The optical fibre can be effortlessly integrated into the OSAM sleeve using a braiding machine, which is generally used for manufacturing strings, easing the mass production process. The radius of curvature of the optical fibre changed when the OSAM was driven. The displacement of the artificial muscle was estimated based on the sensor output. To demonstrate the usefulness of OSAM, displacement feedback control experiments were conducted using the optical fibre sensor integrated into OSAM. From the results, OSAM’s displacement showed a good response to the target displacement. Therefore, the developed artificial muscle can facilitate displacement feedback control without requiring external sensors, which in turn can improve the performance of rehabilitation and wearable devices.