Bidirectional tactile display driven by electrostatic dielectric elastomer actuator

Abstract

This paper presents a novel bidirectional tactile display by integrating an antagonistic dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) with a V-shaped electrostatic actuator (EA), called electrostatic dielectric elastomer actuator (EDEA). Within a simple structure, this device can provide large out-of-plane vibration of the silicone-based DEA membrane. It is noted that, compared to the DEA alone, combining the soft DEA and electrostatic actuator significantly enhances the device performance by about 19.1% in terms of displacement and by about 14%–26% in terms of blocking force. We also analyze the constitutive DEA and EA models to predict the displacement and blocking force behaviors. The simulation results are consistent with the experimental results. The device is successfully fabricated by using 3D printing technology which simplifies the fabrication process and improves the scalability of the system. The tactile display can provide up to 680 μm of displacement and up to 185 mN of blocking force more than the human hand stimulus threshold (displacement/force). By controlling the input voltage and frequency, the device can generate different haptic feelings to the user.