Accelerating electro-ionic soft actuators by feedforward control and the performance degradation by voltage limits

Abstract

Electro-ionic soft actuators have the advantages of being possible to drive at low voltage and to operate in the air by using ionic liquid. However, they have a disadvantage of slow response. This paper proposes to accelerate electro-ionic soft actuators by feedforward control. Feedforward control can automatically generate online pulseshaped input signals from any reference signals and is easy to implement. The experimental results show that the feedforward control can automatically generate control inputs for any references and achieve 2 times faster than the no-control case. In addition, it was found that the control performance was significantly degraded when a voltage limit was set to protect the actuator.