Self-sensing of dielectric elastomer actuator

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a novel, self-sensing technique for dielectric elastomer (DE) actuators which will adequately measure the in-situ impedance variation of the DE under a deformation. A standard signal processing technique was introduced to accurately mix and extract actuating and sensing signals. Although the technique is limited to the actuation-bandwidth of several tens of Hz, its practical use for applications and tests is attractive. With the proposed technique, the self-sensing actuation system was effectively demonstrated without using auxiliary sensors. The proposed technique is useful for many attractive robotic applications including space-limited micro-actuation systems and multi-DOF systems that use hyper redundant manipulators.