Modeling and Control of Artificial Muscles Actuated Systems with Applications to Biomedical Systems

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Over the last decade, electroactive polymers, a novel family of smart materials, have received tremendous interests for their potential applications in sensing, actuation, and energy harvesting. Therein, ionic polymer-metal composites (IPMCs) form an important category of electroactive polymers and have built-in actuation and sensing capabilities. Owing to the IPMCs' softness, resilience, biocompatibility and the capability of producing large deformation under a low action voltage, IPMCs are highly attractive as a material for actuators or sensors in biomedical applications and for developing artificial muscles or biomimetic robots. However, the IPMC actuated systems reflect highly nonlinear characteristics observed in both electrical and mechanical responses including creep, hysteresis, structural nonlinearity, and time-varying behaviors, and so on, which severely limits system performance. Without the aid of feedback control techniques to overcome the these effects, it is only possible to achieve limited positioning accuracy.