Performance investigation and controller design of IPMC actuator

Abstract

Ionic Polymer-Metal Composites (IPMC) has great application prospects in military, aerospace, biomedical and other fields, and attracts more and more attentions in many countries. However, it works with complex mechanism and varies with circumstance and using times, and also is impressible to the preparation process, which limits its development and utilization. Firstly ,this paper developed a complete set of experimental platform for IPMC fabricated by ourselves to study experimentally the displacement response characteristic with different types, frequencies and amplitudes of stimulation signals. Then, a chirp signal with controllable frequency had been used as a input signal for identification, third-order ARX model as a model of IPMC structure, a multi-innovation least squares recursive (MILSR) identification algorithms as model parameters identification online. This paper gained a relatively accurate linear model through identification the model parameters. Thirdly, according to the linear model, both a PID controller and a LMI (Linear Matrix Inequality) based optimal H infinity (∞) controller had been designed. The simulation results show that the controller can effectively control the linear characteristics of IPMC and repeated experiments in the system are still valid. Through controlling two different model of using for 50 times fore-and aft, it has been proved that the optimal H infinity controller has good robustness.