Micromachined polymer actuators as tactors for tactile display

MEMS fabricated smart polymer actuators such as Nafion and PANI are proposed as tactors in the development of tactors-on-chip for applications in virtual reality and tele-operations. Two different polymer materials, i.e., Nafion and PANI, were investigated as potential materials to construct the tactors. Thus far, we have successfully demonstrated that these polymer materials can in fact be used to fabricate MEMS-scale actuators with actuation voltage of less than 10 V. Nafion actuators (w=100 /spl mu/m, l=1200 /spl mu/m, t=0.4 /spl mu/m) were actuated with input power of /spl sim/50 mW and showed dynamic response up to 9 Hz. PANI actuators (w=50 /spl mu/m, l=200 /spl mu/m, t/spl sim/1 /spl mu/m) were shown to actuate in 0.5 M HCl solution using 2.5 V input voltage. The fabrication process for these polymer actuators, their experimental results, and a proposed tactors-on-chip design is presented in this paper.