The paper discusses an approach to monitoring fluidic muscles, applying a non invasive thermal analysis based on infrared thermography. Different working dynamic conditions strongly modify the internal distribution of temperature of muscles, and the thermal gradients can be used as monitoring variables in order to check the correct behaviour of this type of component. A wide research activity, oriented to investigate on correlations between muscle performances and temperature distribution, is under development. This paper collects the result of the first phase of this activity, concerning experimental evaluations of thermal distribution and their relation to specific physical variables.

Keywords: pneumatics, muscles, monitoring, thermography