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Low-volume, low-tech manufacture

To make enough air muscles to sell as well as to use in their own robots, very simple equipment is used. Batches of the same size of muscle are produced using simple jigs (G) of the sort you could make yourself. You might make one or more jigs for efficiency if you had to make a number of similar parts or to ensure that parts were accurately the same as each other.

Only if very much higher volumes (numbers of muscles) were to be made would it be worth setting up a more complicated, faster manufacturing process. As yet there is not that high a demand - not many people are building robots and not many other uses for air muscles have been developed. Of course, one day Shadow might be successful enough in building their robots that a robot could be making the air muscles for them! After all, human beings reproduce themselves! If this was so then the robot could be left to work night and day, and its movements, being more repeatedly controlled than a human's, could produce many more air muscles, so they would be into high-volume, high-tech manufacture. However, Richard doubts whether robots will ever match the dexterity (G) of human hands.

 

Blocking one end of the air feed tube. Below this you can see the simple jig that ensures each air muscle is the same

Inserting the stiff air feed tube into the soft muscle inner tube

The tube assembly going into a plastic cone to thread it through the outer mesh. The cone is then removed

Looping the muscle round guide pegs on the jig with a metal clamping collar in place. Note also the air feed tube

Looping the second end over the jig - ensuring the correct length of muscle and size of end loop

The complete air muscle just needing loose ends to be trimmed Note the pegs on the jig for a smaller size of muscle

The finished air muscle

If you look at either the earlier picture of the hand and arm under development or the later version here you will get some idea of how important the compact size of the air muscles is. Here in the forearm you can see a number of them packed together, bulging like your own forearm muscles. This also shows how important the soft, flexible nature of the muscles is - they push and slide against each other as they move.

 

A later version of the hand and arm robot

The air muscles have to withstand being operated thousands of times so some are tested rigorously.

This picture shows a test jig which operates the muscle endlessly, with a counter recording how many times. This one is approaching 50,000 stretches.

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