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

在过去的十年里，电活性聚合物这一新型智能材料家族因其在传感、驱动和能量收集方面的潜在应用而受到极大的关注。其中，离子聚合物-金属复合材料(IPMC)是电活性聚合物的一个重要类别，具有内置的驱动和传感能力。由于IPMCs的柔软性、弹性、生物相容性和在低电压下产生大变形的能力，IPMCs作为生物医学应用中的驱动器或传感器以及开发人造肌肉或仿生机器人的材料非常有吸引力。然而，IPMC驱动系统在电学和力学响应方面都表现出高度的非线性特征，包括蠕变、滞后、结构非线性和时变行为等，这严重限制了系统的性能。如果没有反馈控制技术来克服这些影响，就只能达到有限的定位精度。

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.