“After experimenting for many years with artificial muscles that are 3D printed, I have come up with a fairly efficient configuration of muscles and bones that can be printed in modular form. This allows for the muscles and supporting bone structures to be reconfigured in various ways to create many kinds of robots.
This creates a kind of erector set that is plug and play—to make robots that are limited only by your own creativity.
The most efficient pneumatic artificial muscle I have developed so far, I call the Omega muscle. Shaped like the omega sign, it is at once a muscle, a tendon, and a ligament that locks into a slot in a bone structure. It provides maximum expansion or rotational movement while occupying a small volume at rest.
Like most robotics, it involves a delightful oversimplification of the complex mechanisms used in animal movements.”