At Salford University they're researching a muscle powered by air pressure to be used in a prototype skeleton you can wear - complete with full set of muscles. It would enable the wearer to work or run for hours without tiring.

A new robot hand is in also being developed that will have the complexities of the human hand. It is different to traditional robot hands, which are very simple - essentially a pair of pliers. In the new design tendons power the fingers and are pulled by the air pressure muscles. Eventually this design could pick up anything that a human hand can pick up

The air muscle is made of 2 parts. The first part is a rubber tube (much like a tube from a bicycle inner tyre) and the other part is a nylon weave material.

The tube goes inside the nylon weave and as you pump compressed air into it the weave is forced to get fatter and shorter - so as you fill it with air it contracts.

Muscle like this could easily hold 150 kilograms. This strength has obvious implications for building sites or military uses. Builders could work all day without tiring or soldiers could run long distances with heavy. Then there are medical uses. Could the air-muscle skeleton offer a new future to people who have suffered severe spinal damage?

The Salford University lower prototype exoskeleton has joints powered by air muscles - using compressed air to assist or force the user into a particular walking pattern which would be computer controlled. Although the system is currently quite heavy the air-muscles mean it carries its own weight

For now a computer controls the leg movements but imagine if the legs could be made to respond to messages from the wearers muscles or even directly from the brain.

The air muscle is made of very simple parts it's cheap to build and economical to run. The drawback is you need a continual supply of compressed air and it is noisy.

Could you design a product using the air muscle?