The emerging field of soft robotics represents the foundation of future robotic systems with a plethora of applications in human-robot interaction, locomotion, and rehabilitation technologies [1]. A crucial component of soft
robotics is a soft actuator that is activated to generate desired motions. Unfortunately, there is a lack of actuators in rehabilitation applications that are portable, and adaptable to different joint sizes, while still matching the performance of the mammalian muscles in response time and output power-to-size ratio. Although various actuator types like SEA/VSAs, shape memory alloys, pneumatic artificial muscles, and dielectric elastomer actuators offer unique advantages and challenges [3–8], they often face limitations in size, efficiency, or power requirements. Motivated by these challenges we have recently designed a bio-inspired highly scalable, flexible, biocompatible Electromagnetic Soft Actuator (ESA) [2]. Our ESA offers a lightweight, portable, and responsive solution, overcoming these limitations while providing ample power [9,10]. A human skeletal muscle with bundles of sarcomeres (composed by actin and myosin) behaves like a network of soft actuators. Similarly, a network of ESA can be integrated inside an Artificial Muscle (AM). The main research gaps are in constructing optimized ESAs that are sparsely controlled to avoid inefficiencies.

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