Parallel Compensation control for Tube-type Dielectric elastomer actuator

Recently, dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) has been paid more attention because of its prominent characteristics such as high response, large stretch rate, lightweight etc. However, DEA has hysteresis that may lead the system to exhibit inaccuracies or oscillations and even instability. In this paper, a novel parallel compensation control system is designed for tube-type DEA to compensate the effect of hysteresis. In details, a modified play-type Prandtl-Ishlinskii hysteresis model is built to describe the tube-type DEA. Then, based on properties between play and stop hysteresis operators, a parallel compensator is constructed by using stop hysteresis operator. For rejecting the effect of input disturbance and plant perturbation, disturbance observer (DOB) is designed. To guarantee the tracking performance of the system, a tracking controller is also designed. Finally, simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.