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Our muscles are nature’s actuators. The sinewy tissue is what generates the forces that make our bodies move. In recent years, engineers have used real muscle tissue to actuate “biohybrid robots” made from both living tissue and synthetic parts. By pairing lab-grown muscles with synthetic skeletons, researchers are engineering a menagerie of muscle-powered crawlers, walkers, swimmers, and grippers.But for the most part, these designs are limited in the amount of motion and power they can produce. Now, MIT engineers are aiming to give bio-bots a power lift with artificial tendons.In a study <a href="https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202512680" target="_blank">appearing today in the journal Advanced Science</a>, the researchers developed artificial tendons made from tough and flexible hydrogel. They attached the rubber band-like tendons to either end of a small piece of lab-grown muscle, forming a “muscle-tendon unit.” Then they connected the ends of each artificial tendon to the fingers of a robotic gripper.When they stimulated the central muscle to contract, the tendons pulled the gripper’s fingers together. The robot pinched its fingers together three times faster, and with 30 times greater force, compared with the same design without the connecting tendons.The researchers envision the new muscle-tendon unit can be fit to a wide range of biohybrid robot designs, much like a universal engineering element.“We are introducing artificial tendons as interchangeable connectors between muscle actuators and robotic skeletons,” says lead author Ritu Raman, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering (MechE) at MIT. “Such modularity could make it easier to design a wide range of robotic applications, from microscale surgical tools to adaptive, autonomous exploratory machines.”The study’s MIT co-authors include graduate students Nicolas Castro, Maheera Bawa, Bastien Aymon, Sonika Kohli, and Angel Bu; undergraduate Annika Marschner; postdoc Ronald Heisser; alumni Sarah J. Wu ’19, SM ’21, PhD ’24 and Laura Rosado ’22, SM ’25; and MechE professors Martin Culpepper and Xuanhe Zhao.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1764609392839-MIT-ArtificialTendons-02-press.jpg" style="width:100%px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" />Researchers use an optical stimulation apparatus to move the muscle-tendon unit. The rubber band-like tendons can pull when they are stimulated. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers<h2>Muscle’s gains</h2>Raman and her colleagues at MIT are at the forefront of biohybrid robotics, a relatively new field that has emerged in the last decade. They focus on combining synthetic, structural robotic parts with living muscle tissue as natural actuators.“Most actuators that engineers typically work with are really hard to make small,” Raman says. “Past a certain size, the basic physics doesn’t work. The nice thing about muscle is, each cell is an independent actuator that generates force and produces motion. So you could, in principle, make robots that are really small.”Muscle actuators also come with other advantages, which Raman’s team has already demonstrated: The tissue can grow stronger as it works out, and can naturally heal when injured. For these reasons, Raman and others envision that muscly droids could one day be sent out to explore environments that are too remote or dangerous for humans. Such muscle-bound bots could build up their strength for unforeseen traverses or heal themselves when help is unavailable. Biohybrid bots could also serve as small, surgical assistants that perform delicate, microscale procedures inside the body.All these future scenarios are motivating Raman and others to find ways to pair living muscles with synthetic skeletons. Designs to date have involved growing a band of muscle and attaching either end to a synthetic skeleton, similar to looping a rubber band around two posts. When the muscle is stimulated to contract, it can pull the parts of a skeleton together to generate a desired motion.But Raman says this method produces a lot of wasted muscle that is used to attach the tissue to the skeleton rather than to make it move. And that connection isn’t always secure. Muscle is quite soft compared with skeletal structures, and the difference can cause muscle to tear or detach. What’s more, it is often only the contractions in the central part of the muscle that end up doing any work — an amount that’s relatively small and generates little force.“We thought, how do we stop wasting muscle material, make it more modular so it can attach to anything, and make it work more efficiently?” Raman says. “The solution the body has come up with is to have tendons that are halfway in stiffness between muscle and bone, that allow you to bridge this mechanical mismatch between soft muscle and rigid skeleton. They’re like thin cables that wrap around joints efficiently.”<h2>“Smartly connected”</h2>In their new work, Raman and her colleagues designed artificial tendons to connect natural muscle tissue with a synthetic gripper skeleton. Their material of choice was hydrogel — a squishy yet sturdy polymer-based gel. Raman obtained hydrogel samples from her colleague and co-author Xuanhe Zhao, who has pioneered the development of hydrogels at MIT. Zhao’s group has derived recipes for hydrogels of varying toughness and stretch that can stick to many surfaces, including synthetic and biological materials.To figure out how tough and stretchy artificial tendons should be in order to work in their gripper design, Raman’s team first modeled the design as a simple system of three types of springs, each representing the central muscle, the two connecting tendons, and the gripper skeleton. They assigned a certain stiffness to the muscle and skeleton, which were previously known, and used this to calculate the stiffness of the connecting tendons that would be required in order to move the gripper by a desired amount.From this modeling, the team derived a recipe for hydrogel of a certain stiffness. Once the gel was made, the researchers carefully etched the gel into thin cables to form artificial tendons. They attached two tendons to either end of a small sample of muscle tissue, which they grew using lab-standard techniques. They then wrapped each tendon around a small post at the end of each finger of the robotic gripper — a skeleton design that was developed by MechE professor Martin Culpepper, an expert in designing and building precision machines.When the team stimulated the muscle to contract, the tendons in turn pulled on the gripper to pinch its fingers together. Over multiple experiments, the researchers found that the muscle-tendon gripper worked three times faster and produced 30 times more force compared to when the gripper is actuated just with a band of muscle tissue (and without any artificial tendons). The new tendon-based design also was able to keep up this performance over 7,000 cycles, or muscle contractions.Overall, Raman saw that the addition of artificial tendons increased the robot’s power-to-weight ratio by 11 times, meaning that the system required far less muscle to do just as much work.“You just need a small piece of actuator that’s smartly connected to the skeleton,” Raman says. “Normally, if a muscle is really soft and attached to something with high resistance, it will just tear itself before moving anything. But if you attach it to something like a tendon that can resist tearing, it can really transmit its force through the tendon, and it can move a skeleton that it wouldn’t have been able to move otherwise.”The team’s new muscle-tendon design successfully merges biology with robotics, says biomedical engineer Simone Schürle-Finke, associate professor of health sciences and technology at ETH Zürich.“The tough-hydrogel tendons create a more physiological muscle–tendon–bone architecture, which greatly improves force transmission, durability, and modularity,” says Schürle-Finke, who was not involved with the study. “This moves the field toward biohybrid systems that can operate repeatably and eventually function outside the lab.”With the new artificial tendons in place, Raman’s group is moving forward to develop other elements, such as skin-like protective casings, to enable muscle-powered robots in practical, real-world settings.This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Defense Army Research Office, the MIT Research Support Committee, and the National Science Foundation.

Researchers have developed artificial tendons for muscle-powered robots. They attached the rubber band-like tendons (blue) to either end of a small piece of lab-grown muscle (red), forming a “muscle-tendon unit.” Credit: Courtesy of the researchers; edited by MIT News

The new design from MIT engineers could pump up many biohybrid builds.

Artificial tendons give muscle-powered robots a boost

Inflatable soft actuators that can change shape with a simple increase in pressure can be powerful, lightweight, and flexible components for soft robotic systems. But there&rsquo;s a problem: These actuators always deform in the same way upon pressurization.To enhance the functionality of soft robots, it is important to enable additional and more complex modes of deformation in soft actuators.Now, researchers from the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.seas.harvard.edu/" target="_blank">Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences&nbsp;</a>(SEAS) have taken inspiration from origami to create inflatable structures that can bend, twist and move in complex, distinct ways from a single source of pressure.The research was published in&nbsp;<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.202201891" target="_blank">Advanced Functional Materials</a>.Most of today&rsquo;s inflatable soft actuators are monostable, meaning they need a constant input of pressure to maintain their inflated state. Lose that pressure and the structure deflates to its only stable form.&ldquo;If you inflate a monostable structure, it always gives you the same deployed shape and it returns to the same initial shape when you release pressure,&rdquo; said David Melancon, a former graduate student at SEAS and co-first author of the paper. &ldquo;In this work, we use bistable origami building blocks to circumvent that limitation.&rdquo;Bistable origami blocks are stable in two distinct configurations and don&rsquo;t require constant pressure to remain deployed.&nbsp;The research team, led by<a href="https://www.seas.harvard.edu/person/katia-bertoldi" target="_blank">&nbsp;Katia Bertoldi</a>, the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at SEAS, used a classical origami pattern known as the Kresling motif, which is characterized by alternating mountain and valley folds on a cylinder to form triangular cells.&nbsp;The researchers first created simple monostable modules out of the Kresling pattern. To unlock bistability, they added a defect in the origami motif: an extra node that creates a four-triangle dome that can pop in or out if a certain amount of negative or positive pressure is supplied.&nbsp;&ldquo;The way it works is simple,&rdquo; said Antonio Elia Forte, a former postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and co-first author of the paper. &nbsp;&ldquo;We first inflate the structure at a specific pressure to pop specific cells that will remain popped even when you remove the pressure. Then, in this new configuration, because we break symmetry, we can simply use a vacuum to trigger bending, contraction, or twisting. Next, we inflate the structure to a second pressure to pop additional cells that unlock completely different deformations when we vacuum again.&rdquo;Forte is currently an Assistant Professor at Kings College London.&ldquo;By assembling different modules and tuning their geometry to cause snapping at different pressures, we create structures capable of complex shapes and deformation modes that can be pre-programmed and activated using only one pressure source,&rdquo; said Melancon, who is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University.&nbsp;<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/chW-s38GNbc?&wmode=opaque&rel=0&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://www.wevolver.com" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" style="width: 767px; height: 426px;"></iframe>The researchers demonstrate an actuator with 12 different modules and showed that it can perform different complex motions. (Credit: Bertoldi Lab/Harvard SEAS)&nbsp;The researchers built an actuator with 12 different modules and showed that it can perform up to eight different, complex motions. &nbsp;The team also developed an algorithm that can identify the optimal combination of modules for the desired deformation modes.&nbsp;Since the mechanics at play in the system are driven by geometry, the approach could lead to applications across scales.&ldquo;By simply increasing and decreasing the pressure, our inflatable actuators can perform complex tasks, no cables, motors or electricity required,&rdquo; said Bertoldi. &ldquo;This is important for many applications, including surgical operations or space exploration.&rdquo;&nbsp;The research was co-authored by Leon M. Kamp and Benjamin Gorissen.

An extra node (yellow) that pops in or out if a certain amount of negative or positive pressure is supplied gives this origami-inspired building block bistability. By combining these building blocks, researchers built an actuator that can bend, twist and move in complex, distinct ways from a single source of pressure. (Credit: Bertoldi Lab/Harvard SEAS)  

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