Theoretical and experimental research about the linear pneumatic actuators with cylindrical membrane and braided shell

The object studied in this paper is the pneumatic actuator named braided artificial muscle, essentially a linear engine with a simple action and spring return, but which has a variable area of the piston. It has been called ”muscle” because of the similitude between its actuation and that of the biological muscles. The mathematical model and the experimental results converge in case of the static analysis, but difficulties might appear in the study of this type of actuator with strong non-linear characteristics.