A Monopropellant-Powered Muscle Actuation System

This paper describes the design and control of a new monopropellant-powered muscle actuation system for robotic systems, especially the mobile systems inspired by biological principles. Based on the pneumatic artificial muscle, this system features a high power density, as well as characteristics similar to biological muscles. By introducing the monopropellant as the energy storage media, this system utilizes the high energy density of liquid fuel and provides a high-pressure gas supply with a simple structure in a compact form. This addresses the limitations of pneumatic supplies on mobile devices and thus is expected to facilitate the future application of artificial muscles on bio-robotic systems. In this paper, design of the monopropellant-powered muscle actuation system is presented as well as a robust controller design that provides effective control for this highly nonlinear system. To demonstrate the proposed muscle actuation system, an experimental prototype was constructed on which the proposed control algorithm provides good tracking performance.