Closed-Loop Control of Electro-Ribbon Actuators

Frontiers in Robotics and AI

Tim Helps¹  Aaron Fishman¹  Richard Suphapol Diteesawat¹  Jonathan Rossiter¹  Majid Taghavi¹ 

[1] Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Bristol, United Kingdom;Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom;

关键词: control;    soft robotics;    actuator;    electrostatic;    zipping;    pull-in instability;   

DOI  :  10.3389/frobt.2020.557624

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Electro-ribbon actuators are lightweight, flexible, high-performance actuators for next generation soft robotics. When electrically charged, electrostatic forces cause the electrode ribbons to progressively zip together through a process called dielectrophoretic liquid zipping (DLZ), delivering contractions of more than 99% of their length. Electro-ribbon actuators exhibit pull-in instability, and this phenomenon makes them challenging to control: below the pull-in voltage threshold, actuator contraction is small, while above this threshold, increasing electrostatic forces cause the actuator to completely contract, providing a narrow contraction range for feedforward control. We show that application of a time-varying voltage profile that starts above pull-in threshold, but subsequently reduces, allows access to intermediate steady-states not accessible using traditional feed-forward control. A modified proportional-integral closed-loop controller is proposed (Boost-PI), which incorporates a variable boost voltage to temporarily elevate actuation close to, but not exceeding, the pull-in voltage threshold. This primes the actuator for zipping and drastically reduces rise time compared with a traditional PI controller. A multi-objective parameter-space approach was implemented to choose appropriate controller gains by assessing the metrics of rise time, overshoot, steady-state error, and settle time. This proposed control method addresses a key limitation of the electro-ribbon actuators, allowing the actuator to perform staircase and oscillatory control tasks. This significantly increases the range of applications which can exploit this new DLZ actuation technology.

【 授权许可】

Unknown