Reconsidering Fascicles in Soft Pneumatic Actuator Packs

TL;DR

This paper critically examines previous claims about the force advantages of fascicle configurations in soft pneumatic actuators, revealing energy conservation violations and methodological errors to provide a more accurate understanding.

Contribution

It identifies errors in prior work claiming force benefits of fascicles and offers a corrected analytical framework for soft pneumatic actuator packs.

Findings

Original claims violate conservation of energy.

Methodological errors led to incorrect conclusions.

Provides a revised framework for analyzing fascicle configurations.

Abstract

This paper discusses and contests the claims of ``Soft Pneumatic Actuator Fascicles for High Force and Reliability'' a research article which was originally published in the March 2017 issue of the Journal Soft Robotics. The original paper claims that the summed forces of multiple thin-walled extending McKibben muscles are greater than a volumetrically equivalent actuator of the same length at the same pressure. The original paper also claims that the purported benefit becomes more pronounced as the number of smaller actuators is increased. Using reasonable assumptions, the analysis of this paper shows that the claims of the original paper violate the law of conservation of energy. This paper also identifies errors in the original methodology that may have led to the erroneous conclusions of the original paper. The goal of this paper is to correct the record and to provide a more accurate framework for considering fascicles used in soft pneumatic actuator packs.