Modeling of Artificial Muscles Capable of Both Actuation and Sensing

Abstract

In recent years, soft smart materials have attracted attention and been used to develop artificial muscles for soft robots or soft mechanisms. Since the characteristics of dielectric elastomer are similar to the ones of human muscles, they are applied to develop artificial muscles capable of both actuation and sensing in this research. In detail, artificial muscles made of dielectric elastomer (DE) are fabricated by using a semi-automatic pre-stretching mechanism. The actuating model of artificial muscles is built considering hysteretic nonlinearity, and its parameters are estimated based on experimental data by using particle swarm optimization (PSO). The self-sensing model of artificial muscles is also built based on experimental data. The developed artificial muscles can sense the status itself based on this model and be applied without external sensors such as laser sensors or web cameras.