Modeling and inverse compensation of hysteresis in supercoiled polymer artificial muscles

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2017

Jun Zhang, Kaushik Iyer, Anthony Simeonov, Michael C Yip

Publisher Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7814286/

Abstract: The supercoiled polymer (SCP) actuator is a recently discovered artificial muscle that demonstrates significant mechanical power, large contraction, and good dynamic range in a muscle-like form factor. There has been a rapid increase of research efforts devoted to the study of SCP actuators. For robotics, SCP actuators overcome specific challenges of artificial muscles such as shape memory alloy wires, where limited strain and slow dynamics, and power consumption had limited their use. It is known that hysteresis nonlinearity results from coiling the threads, and can cause up to 30% strain difference under the same voltage; however, no work has been reported to characterize the hysteresis in SCP actuators. In this paper, three new models are formulated to characterize the hysteretic relationship between three coupled variables (voltage input, strain, and load) of an SCP actuator, namely, the augmented …

Zhang et al. (2017) Modeling and inverse compensation of hysteresis in supercoiled polymer artificial muscles, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 773-780.