CONVENTIONAL AND EVOLUTIONARY CONTROL SCHEMES FOR SPRING-ROLL DIELECTRIC ELASTOMER ACTUATOR

El-Garhy, Ahmed M.; Anees, Besada A.; El-Adawy, Mohamed I.

doi:10.21608/jesaun.2012.114484

CONVENTIONAL AND EVOLUTIONARY CONTROL SCHEMES FOR SPRING-ROLL DIELECTRIC ELASTOMER ACTUATOR

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

¹ Electronics and Communication Dept., Faculty of Engineering, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt.

² Industrial Training Council, Cairo, Egypt.

³ Communication, Electronics and Computer Department, Faculty of Engineering, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt.

10.21608/jesaun.2012.114484

Abstract

To control the actuation of the spring-roll dielectric elastomer actuator, the required actuation and dimensionless axial force (load) should be prescribed. Required actuation can be considered as a set point of the control system. In this paper different conventional and evolutionary controllers have been proposed, PID, Fuzzy, PID-Fuzzy average, particle swarm optimizing algorithm based PID. The performance of all these controllers have been addressed in terms of steady state error, maximum overshoot, and time consumed for the sake of qualitative comparison. To control the actuation of the spring-roll dielectric elastomer actuator, the charges pumped by the voltage supply should be controlled. A unity feed back control system is used. The response of each control system is derived and the choice of the more suitable controller is an application dependent, where some applications need zero steady state error while others need fast response. Spring-roll dielectric elastomer voltage supply and control system are based upon optimal design parameters derived in [1, 2]. The results of the conducted simulation experiments proved that all developed control systems are robust and help the usage of the spring-roll dielectric elastomer as a structural unit of an active artificial muscle.

Keywords