A versatile conducting interpenetrating polymer network for sensing and actuation

This work deals with a Conducting-Interpenetrating Polymer Network (C-IPN). The C-IPN exhibits very interesting and promising properties which can make it suitable for applications in robotics as a tool to perform tasks in the fields of manipulation, grasping or force measurement. It is known in the literature that such C-IPN may be actuated and bended to interact with other objects. Some of them can also be used as sensors to characterize the interaction. In this paper, we show that actuation and sensing can be performed at the same time. Moreover, we propose analytical models which can be useful for future work to process the C-IPN output and to control them. All results are verified with experimental data.