artificial muscle is fast

A researcher was building mechanical flys and could not use motors because they do not scale down to insect size. He used a polymer based artifical muscle. It looks like they could work for hank's musical fingering.

Now to find where they can be purchased.

**broken link removed**

I've not heard of polymer based fibres, but I know you can get nitinol from McMaster Carr online, as well as Jameco.

I don't know if nitinol is what you're looking for, but you should look into all the metallic muscle wires. Most of them work by rearranging the atoms when a current is applied, and reverting when the current is stopped. You could easily hook one up to a µC in that case, and make yourself a little flying bug.

Also, I know nitinol is relatively cheap, so you really should look into it.

I have no immediate interest in building flying insects, but it sounds fun. I was thinking about Hank Fletcher's work on building robots that play music on existing instruments. The memory metal solutions were too slow.

The link I provided in the original post states

How Does EPAM Work?

The basic EPAM architecture is made up of a proprietary dielectric elastomer that is coated on both sides with another expandable film of a conducting electrode. When voltage is applied to the two electrodes a Maxwell pressure is created upon the dielectric layer. The elastic dielectric polymer acts as an incompressible fluid expanding in the planar directions. Electrical force is converted to mechanical actuation and motion.

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This stuff is many times faster the metal solutions.

3v0

I would love to see a video showing how this polymer works. Any links?

You can check the link to the company making in my original post. It is long enough that I do not recall what they had there.

The insects they showed in the TV program were quite fast. Maybe 100's of beats per second sort of thing.

There are other things in the works that we can not get.
Climbing The Walls? New Adhesive Mimics Gecko Toe Hairs Interesting but needs work.

3v0 said:

could not use motors because they do not scale down to insect size

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Ah, but they do!

Sarcos' electrostatic wobble motors have rotors down to 120 microns (a human hair is 80 microns):

**broken link removed**

I am interested in all mannors of actuators. So thanks and cool.

These places never seem to list sources.

3v0

3v0 said:

These places never seem to list sources.

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Sarcos is the sole source. They provide goods per contract.

(These are the guys who built the later generation animatronics for Disney, the robotics for the fountains at the Bellagio, the figures for the Jurassic Park ride at Universal, Master-Slave robots and Exoskeletons for the military, etc.)