A proposal for manipulating Nafion micro actuators using neural-fuzzy based control

The ability to manipulate and control biological cells with reflective-force information is a key technology necessary for many new applications in Bio-MEMS, but is currently lacking in all cellular manipulators. We report in this paper our preliminary experimental work in using an ionic conducting polymer film (ICPF) to develop a biological cellular robotic gripper with force sensing capability. ICPF actuators are able to give large deflection with small input voltage (/spl sim/5V) in aqueous environments, and also able to give relatively large output voltage due to deflection by mechanical forces. Thus, ICPF actuators are investigated as possible cellular force-reflection controlled manipulators in our work. However, an universally accepted or accurate dynamic model for ICPF actuators does not exit yet due to the complex interdependent physical mechanisms which govern their actuation behavior electrical, chemical, and mechanical. This makes grasping control and manipulation hard ID achieve, especially if the ICPF actuators are to be used in manipulating moving biological targets. In this paper we propose a neural-fuzzy based scheme to control the movement of ICPF micro actuators.