Civil Engineering: EPSRC ICase and DSTL Funded Scholarship: Time Varying Control of Multi-Material Electro-Active Polymer Soft Robots

Motivation: Scientists now predict that forty years of conventional hard robot technology will imminently be superseded by a new soft robotics era. Electro Active Polymers (EAPs) have been identified as ideal ultra-soft active materials for the fabrication of soft robot components due to their ability to undergo highly complex actuation (stretching, bending and twisting) when subjected to electric stimuli via compliant electrodes.  

Applications: Due to their multifunctional nature, EAPs can act actuators (or artificial muscles) by responding to stimuli faster than natural muscle or conventional motors, and their light weight makes them suitable for space platforms, prostheses, exoskeletons, haptic feedback devices, deformable lenses and other system concepts, such as Stacked EAPs (via a sandwiched composite arrangement of EAPs and electrodes), shown to exhibit output forces capable of locomotion/propulsion to lift/manipulate objects. EAPs can also be exploited as flexible tactile sensors (for machine touch), wearable motion-capture sensors and energy harvesters.

Project aim: Building upon cutting-edge work by the group and with the support of EPSRC and the UK Defence, Science and Technology laboratory (DSTL), this PhD project sets out an ambitious research plan which will investigate, with the help of cutting-edge computational modelling and experimental validation, two fundamental aspects: (1) the time-varying response with associated viscoelastic effects in EAP soft robots, in order to predict deformations accurately, and (2) the reliable control in EAP soft robots when accounting for complex internal architecture.