Textile Actuator

Working with members in the Morphable Biorobotics Lab at BU, we developed an actuator that exerts a pulling force given positive pressure.

• Our actuator is lightweight and flexible like the current state-of-the-art devices, but unlike those devices, provides a pulling force powered by a positive pressure (most devices have to use negative pressure) due to a two pouch design.

• My role was to specifically optimize the internal geometry of the actuator to obtain the most force from the least amount of pressure

• I created a generalized manufacturing process for the different geometrical structures using the laser cutter, heat press, and different textile materials.

• Then, we ran some tests to see how much work the different designs could achieve with the same pressure.