Artificial Muscles Technologies and Designs for a Countermeasure Body Suit (original) (raw)

The purpose of the on-going project DYNASUIT is to design a new intravehicular body suit for countermeasure purposes, including state of the art technologies in artificial muscles, body monitoring and biofeedback. This paper focuses on the concepts, designs and testing of the artificial muscles subsystem. Based on a preliminary analysis and a selection of the most promising scenarios, two actuation technologies have been selected for deeper analysis in the project, namely electro-active polymers (EAP) and sigma pneumatic actuators. The paper describes the design and the expected performances of each of the actuation technologies in the suit. The physical demonstrators built during the activity in order to validate the designs and characteristics of the actuators in the context of DYNASUIT, as well as the associated results, are presented. These outputs will be used in the following of the activity to support the detailed design of the full countermeasure suit.