Networked Dielectric Elastomer Balloon Actuators with Large Deformation

Abstract

Soft robots have recently received much interest because of their advantages over traditional rigid robots in terms of withstanding large deformations and interacting well with environments. Soft actuators, as a critical part of a soft robot, provide actuation force to generate desired motion. Dielectric elastomers have shown great promise because of their considerable voltage-induced deformation. Particularly, air-filled dielectric elastomer actuators have been well investigated, where the air inside provides prestretches to improve the actuation capability. This paper proposes a networked design of inflated dielectric elastomer actuators, capable of spanning a large actuation space and a corresponding large control space. Through comparing the performance of modulated operation mode and that of independent operation mode, we theoretically demonstrate that the networked design is able to, to a large extent, postpone the occurrence of material failures of the actuators, resulting in a large and continuous actuation range for their control.