Modeling and Control of a Conical Dielectric Elastomer Actuator Motion System With Springs and Input Square Term

Dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) is a kind of flexible intelligent material actuators and widely used in motion driving devices of soft biomimetic robots. However, both the butterfly-like hysteresis and the square term of the control input make the controller design become challenging. To this end, this article proposes an effective control scheme for a motion platform driven by DEA with the following contributions: first, a new butterfly-like KP (BKP) hysteresis nonlinear mathematical model is constructed to accurately curve the butterfly-like hysteresis in DEA. Second, an implicit inverse compensation control algorithm is proposed, where a novel searching mechanism is designed to extract the actual control signal from the hysteresis temporary controller with input square term. Third, the conical dielectric elastomer motion platform with spring is constructed and the effectiveness of the proposed BKP hysteresis model and input square implicit inverse control strategy is verified through the constructed motion platform.