IPMC Kirigami: A Distributed Actuation Concept

Today's mechatronics relies on conventional transducers, i.e. lumped sensors and actuators with rigid construction. Future consumer products, medical devices and manufacturing processes require sensing and actuation systems with high count and density of individual transducer units. Such systems can be addressed as distributed transducers. Building distributed sensing and actuation systems with conventional transducers is economically unaffordable, and an alternative solution is needed. In this work we propose and study a methodology to build such distributed sensor and actuator systems from soft bending smart material transducers. Individual transducer units can be separated from the planar material substrate by cutting and etching techniques, and transducer counts and densities are only limited by the available smart materials and equipment. In this study we use laser ablation techniques to separate individual transducer units from the ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) sheets, and produce translational actuation units on the bending material substrate. IPMCs are manufactured in-house, different bending structure geometries are studied, and four different designs of the em-scale translational platform units are realized and validated experimentally. The results demonstrate that it is possible to etch and cut a multitude of actuation units into planar bending smart material transducers, that bending actuation can be used to realize translation, and that the designs can be further miniaturized. Therefore, bending smart materials can be utilized to build monolithic distributed transducers.