W13I Electromechanical Soft Actuators based on Ionic Polymers(International Workshop on "New Frontiers of Smart Materials and Structural Systems")

Recently, much attention has been focused on soft materials that can directly transform electrical energy into mechanical work, because they allow a wide range of applications including robotics, tactile and optical display, prosthetic devices, medical devices, micro-electromechanical systems and so forth[1]. Especially, electromechanical polymer actuators, which can work quickly and softly driven by low voltage, are very useful, since they can be used as artificial muscle-like actuators for various bio-medical and human affinity applications. In this presentation, two types of low voltage driven electromechanical soft actuators based on ionic conductive polymers are reviewed, which have been developed by our group and collaborators.