Repetitive control of an Artificial Muscle actuator

Electroactive polymers also known as `Artificial Muscles´ are promising materials for actuation purposes in diverse application areas such as robotics, aerospace and biomedical systems. This paper investigates the dynamics of a polypyrrole conducting electroactive polymer actuator which is desired to track repeating reference commands. We propose a plug-in repetitive controller to improve the tracking performance of a conducting polymer actuator. The repetitive controller is implemented in cascade with a PI (proportional-integral) controller. The response of the system with repetitive controller is then compared to that of obtained by the implementation of the stand-alone PI controller. The experimental results show that the repetitive controller gives superior results compared to the PI controller and improves the tracking performance significantly.