Modeling and Control of Conducting Polymer Actuator

Conducting polymer (CP) actuator has nonlinear dynamic characteristics during its charge process. In this study, we proposed an electromechanic model and an optimal controller for a type of ionic electroactive polymer (IEPA) actuator with submillimeter scale, which can produce large deformation under low actuation voltage. The electronic model is to describe the evolution of charge state in time domain. The mechanic model is to calculate the deformation of CP actuator under the actuation force and external force. Based on the electromechanic coupling model, a parameter identification method is proposed to estimate the nonlinear parameter of CP actuator. The experiments show that our electromechanic model successfully predicts the deformation of actuator under different input voltages with the identified parameters. In the last step, an optimal controller is designed to control the orientation of IEAP actuator, which achieves at a high control performance in our experiments. The success of the modeling and control lays the foundation work for the subsequent biomedical applications.