Owing to their compliance, lightweight, and high force density characteristics, pneumatic actuation systems have been widely implemented in various soft robots. However, pneumatic actuation systems exhibit low efficiency, poor control performance, and high noise; these make it extremely challenging to widely employ a pneumatic actuation system in mobile robots. To overcome these limitations, many researches were conducted on recycling the compressed air within such systems. However, the proposed approaches do not consider the system efficiency and exhaust performance of pneumatic systems. Therefore, this article proposes a recirculation system using a novel soft re-air valve based on the cardiac structure of fish. In particular, the proposed recirculation system recycles the compressed air to improve the system efficiency and pressurizing performance, and the soft re-air valve simultaneously prevents a decrease in the depressurizing performance. For the validation of the proposed scheme, experiments were conducted to evaluate the system efficiency, control performance, and exhaust noise. In contrast to conventional pneumatic systems, the experimental results revealed that the proposed system increased the overall system efficiency by 47.58%, reduced the position root mean square error by 8.16%, and reduced the exhaust noise by 47.52%.

中文翻译：

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基于仿生软再空气阀的高效气动驱动空气再循环系统

由于其柔顺性、重量轻和力密度高的特点，气动驱动系统已广泛应用于各种软机器人中。然而，气动执行系统效率低、控制性能差、噪音大；这些使得在移动机器人中广泛采用气动驱动系统变得极具挑战性。为了克服这些限制，对在此类系统中回收压缩空气进行了许多研究。然而，所提出的方法没有考虑气动系统的系统效率和排气性能。因此，本文提出了一种基于鱼类心脏结构的新型软再空气阀的再循环系统。尤其，所提出的再循环系统对压缩空气进行再循环以提高系统效率和加压性能，并且软再空气阀同时防止减压性能下降。为了验证所提出的方案，进行了实验以评估系统效率、控制性能和排气噪声。与传统气动系统相比，实验结果表明，该系统整体系统效率提高了47.58%，位置均方根误差降低了8.16%，排气噪声降低了47.52%。和排气噪音。与传统气动系统相比，实验结果表明，该系统整体系统效率提高了47.58%，位置均方根误差降低了8.16%，排气噪声降低了47.52%。和排气噪音。与传统气动系统相比，实验结果表明，该系统整体系统效率提高了47.58%，位置均方根误差降低了8.16%，排气噪声降低了47.52%。