Portable compressed air, how ?

Ive worked for couple of years in industrial automation fields. Pneumatic actuators are quite common and widely used in industrial robots, as there's always a regulated supply of pressure air available. Correct me if im wrong, but hobby roboticist do not use pneumatics because:

1 ) actuators are expensive 2 ) off-the shelf compressed air "batteries" do not exist

First point can be solved with supply and demand laws, plus IMO Shadow's air muscles are already quite a leap forward in price, and power-to-weight ratio ( also important ). For those who havent seen em yet, thats a telltale picture

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what can be done about point 2 ? Whats the state of the art in portable regulated air supply ? Probably a high-pressure compressed air cylinder with pressure regulator would work, but how small and cheap could such combination be ? Is anyone working on such product or already manufacturing somesuch ? Here's a short introduction about possibilities for small robots,
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-kert

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Kaido Kert
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manufacturing

Yeah about 7or 8 years ago we used compressed air for the shoulder "muscles" in this robot torso used in a department store Christmas display (using standard pneumatic actuators).

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Leonardo was controlled by a PC and the pneumatics were supplied by a compressor. The problem with stored compressed air, of course, the weight of the air (an 1ft cube of standard bottled compressed air weighs about 5kg), the cylinder is likely to weigh as much again.

Cheers, Alf snipped-for-privacy@remove.the.obvious.ieee.org

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Unbeliever

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