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，一个新的家庭的智能材料，已收到巨大的兴趣，其潜在的应用在传感，驱动，和能量收集。其中，离子聚合物-金属复合材料（IPMC）形成电活性聚合物的重要类别，并且具有内置的致动和感测能力。由于IPMC的柔软性、弹性、生物相容性和在低动作电压下产生大变形的能力，IPMC作为生物医学应用中的致动器或传感器的材料以及用于开发人工肌肉或仿生机器人的材料是非常有吸引力的。然而，IPMC驱动系统反映了高度非线性特性，包括蠕变，滞后，结构非线性，和时变行为，等等，严重限制了系统的性能。如果没有反馈控制技术的帮助来克服这些影响，则仅可能实现有限的定位精度。

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.