Micromachined polymer actuators as tactors for tactile display

MEMS fabricated smart polymer actuators such as Nafion and PANI are proposed as tactors in the development of tactors-on-chip for applications in virtual reality and tele-operations. Two different polymer materials, i.e., Nafion and PANI, were investigated as potential materials to construct the tactors. Thus far, we have successfully demonstrated that these polymer materials can in fact be used to fabricate MEMS-scale actuators with actuation voltage of less than 10 V. Nafion actuators (w=100 μm, l=1200 μm, t=0.4 μm) were actuated with input power of ∼50 mW and showed dynamic response up to 9 Hz. PANI actuators (w=50 μm, l=200 μm, t∼1 μm) were shown to actuate in 0.5 M HCl solution using 2.5 V input voltage. The fabrication process for these polymer actuators, their experimental results, and a proposed tactors-on-chip design is presented in this paper.