Feasibility studies of Arduino microcontroller usage for IPMC actuator control

This paper investigates the usage of Arduino microcontroller to control closed loop of Ionic Polymer Metal Composite (IPMC) actuator response designed for compact underwater application. We demonstrate control of single IPMC actuator by PID controller using MATLAB/Simulink Arduino Input Output (ArduinoIO) support package. Experimental results show that the microcontroller able to differentiate response speed, stability and tracking error of different thicknesses of IPMC actuator when stimulated by multiple voltage waves and frequencies. Based on step signal and square waves tracking performance results, thinner IPMC (t1) has more than 5 times respond speed than thicker IPMC (t2). However, IPMC t1 has lower steady-state stability and more sensitive to external noise compared to IPMC t2 due to IPMC actuator mechanism factors and current Arduino setup limitation such as low sampling rate. For sinusoidal waves tracking analysis, IPMC t2 with lower frequency reference input shows minimum erms error (3.12 %), while IPMC t2 with higher frequency contains highest erms error (28.70 %). Therefore, added with further improvements in improving analog read sampling rate and analog write resolution, Arduino microcontroller can accurately control and analyse the IPMC actuator, thus manage to replace expensive and bulky current DAQ hardware.