Muscles are remarkably effective systems for generating controlled force, and engineers developing hardware for robots or prosthetics have long struggled to create analogs that can approach their unique combination of strength, rapid response, scalability, and control. But now, researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Politecnico di Bari in Italy have developed artificial muscle fibers that come closer to matching many of these qualities.

Like the fibers that bundle together to form biological muscles, these fibers can be arranged in different configurations to meet the demands of a given task. Unlike conventional robotic actuation systems, they are compliant enough to interface comfortably with the human body and operate silently without motors, external pumps, or other bulky supporting hardware.

The new electrofluidic fiber muscles—electrically driven actuators built in fiber format—are described in a recent paper published in Science Robotics. The work is led by Media Lab Ph.D. candidate Ozgun Kilic Afsar; Vito Cacucciolo, a professor at the Politecnico di Bari; and four co-authors.