Neuro-fuzzy control of electroactive polymer actuators

Authors

C M. Druitt, Bae Systems Australia
G Alici, University of WollongongFollow

RIS ID

81571

Publication Details

Druitt, C. M. & Alici, G. (2013). Neuro-fuzzy control of electroactive polymer actuators. 2013 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) (pp. 373-380). United States: IEEE.

Abstract

Electroactive polymer actuators, especially those based on polypyrrole (PPy), possess unique characteristics such as an ability to operate at the macro or micro scale, large forceto- weight ratio, biocompatibility, low cost and operation in aqueous and non-aqueous environments. Therefore, they are very suitable for the establishment of bio-mimetic devices, single-cell manipulators, robotics, prosthetics, and numerous biomedical applications. In this paper, we report on the neurofuzzy control of these actuators, which are typified by the trilayer polypyrrole actuators considered in this paper, in order to improve their positioning accuracy and speed of response. We experimentally evaluated two model-free intelligent control strategies, which are fuzzy logic PD+I control and neuro-fuzzy Adaptive Neural Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) control. The performance of these intelligent controllers is compared to that of a conventional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller. The experimental results demonstrated that they significantly outperformed the conventional PID controller with an improvement in rise time of at least 18 times and in settling time of at least 2 times. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to design and evaluate fuzzy logic PD+I and neuro-fuzzy ANFIS PD+I intelligent control methodologies for an important class of electroactive polymer actuators.