Time-delay control of ionic polymer metal composite actuator

Abstract

This paper presents the control of an ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) strip, which is an electro-active polymer actuator. IPMC can produce mechanical bending motion in response to an electrical excitation. Although IPMC has many beneficial properties, such as low power consumption, large deformation, and bi-directional actuation, it is very challenging to control because of its time-varying and nonlinear properties. Time-delay control (TDC) was applied to an IPMC strip in order to obtain a robust and precise tracking performance. The TDC scheme has shown good tracking performance with exceptional robustness in many other applications, in addition to having a simple and efficient structure and design process. A first-order filter was applied to the control input to reduce the sensor noise. An anti-windup scheme was also used because of its inherent integral effect. The simulation and experimental results of an IPMC strip controlled by TDC showed good performance in the steady state and transient responses. Furthermore, the control output responses tracked the desired model even when the IPMC parameters varied in repetitive experiments. In addition, it was shown through Nyquist analysis that the stability of the IPMC strip controlled by TDC is always maintained with the time-varying parameters. These results demonstrate that the TDC law applied to a time-varying and nonlinear IPMC provides robustness in performance and stability, while yielding precise transient and steady state tracking performance.