The soft robot requires variable stiffness technology, which shall be simplified and compliant with the robotic motion. As inspired by the principle of biological muscle, this paper designed a light and fully flexible artificial muscle which can be manufactured by 3D printing technology. With a voltage on, the artificial muscle is capable of instantly promoting its stiffness by an induced fringe electric field. The work analyzed this artificial muscle through a combination of theoretical model and experiments and developed a semi-active vibration absorber for vibration attenuation. The results are compared with other variable stiffness technologies and reveal its advantages of fast and light weight in stiffness tunability.

Updated by: Ketao Zhang