Control of Dielectric Elastomer Soft Actuators Using Antagonistic Pairs

The inherent compliance and resilience allow soft robots to deal with unstructured environments. Among the various soft actuators explored for soft robotic applications, dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) stand out due to their intriguing advantages of large deformation, high energy density, fast...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE/ASME transactions on mechatronics 2019-12, Vol.24 (6), p.2862-2872
Main Authors: Liang, Wenyu, Cao, Jiawei, Ren, Qinyuan, Xu, Jian-Xin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Actuation
Actuators
Adaptation models
Adaptive control
antagonistic pairs
bioinspiration
Cerebellum
Controllers
dielectric elastomers
Elastomers
Flux density
Force
High speed
Muscles
soft actuators
Soft robotics
Strain
Viscoelasticity
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Summary:The inherent compliance and resilience allow soft robots to deal with unstructured environments. Among the various soft actuators explored for soft robotic applications, dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) stand out due to their intriguing advantages of large deformation, high energy density, fast response, and low cost. However, the viscoelasticity and the electromechanical coupling of these actuators increase the difficulty of the control design, especially for large deformation and/or high-speed operations. In this paper, the control issue of the DEAs is investigated. Inspired by the similarities between DEAs and biological muscles, an antagonistic actuation mechanism is proposed for DEAs control. Owing to the actions of the agonist can be compensated by the antagonist, the viscoelastic effects of the DEAs in antagonistic pairs can be compensated by each other. Moreover, a cerebellum-inspired adaptive learning controller for achieving accurate movements of the DEAs is designed and analyzed. To study the proposed actuation mechanism and controller, a simple 1-DOF manipulator based on two DEAs in an antagonistic pair is developed as a platform. Finally, several experiments have been conducted to test the developed system, and the results show that the proposed approach can achieve good performance even in large deformation and/or high-speed operations as well as strong robustness in disturbance rejection.
ISSN:1083-4435
1941-014X
DOI:10.1109/TMECH.2019.2945518