This may be of interest to you sandy?

I had a demo of one of these air muscles. It was really strong and had pretty good proportional control. Unfortunately not good enough for animatronic use, but would probably be pretty usefull for theme park type animatronics?

Check out the link, let me know what you think.

M@

Hi Matt. I had a demo too, a couple of years back, and bought one of the
non-servo versions to play with, plus a couple of proportional valves. The valves are interesting when pulled to bits - a car tyre valve and a couple of centimetres of nitinol memory wire. I wonder if you didn't like the demo because of the 'hunting' in the control... I figure that this is because of the time lag in the valves they use, the heating up of the nitinol takes a good old fraction of a second. I already had my own system up and running using a more robust muscle made by german company Festo and different valves - no hunting! I have a love-hate relationship with air-muscle technology though - also played with the Shadow robotics muscle, very similar in construction to the Merlin - basically something like bicycle inner tube inside some plastic
electricians braiding. Friction between these surfaces is a source of wear, so the operational life is not suitable for theme-park use. Festo's 'fluidic muscle' uses a high tech cross-woven composite material and has a longer lifespan - we built a Chistmas animatronic last year which employed over 40 of them, and had several failures over just a few months, alas still don't know exactly why they failed exactly... I've ranted!!! ;) Do you think a muscle with precise control, just like an r/c servo could have a place in film animatronics?

Hi Sandy,

I think if the control side and speed were sorted out in the air muscle design, then there could possible be an application within animatronics. However, the ones that I have seen as you suggest do tend to hunt, and just don't react quick enough.

I will check out the link above when I have time, I'm just about to head up to Brisbane for 12/14 days.. so will be out of touch for a bit.. I think I might use a meaningless plane emotiocon.. the plane! ;)