In this study, the displacement and blocking force of the tip point of a cantilevered electro-active polymer (EAP) actuator has been controlled for a cell injection process which consists of approaching, interacting and leaving steps. A vision-based system is used to acquire the tip displacement data for identifying a transfer function model of the actuator and its position control. Discrete time Proportional-Integral controllers are used to control the position and blocking force. A Smith Predictor is utilized in the vision-based position control system to compensate for the time delay due to image processing. Experimental position and blocking force results prove that the proposed control strategies are effective enough to guide the actuator to undertake the cell injection process. This study contributes to the previously published work from the point of view of simultaneously controlling the position and blocking force of the electroactive polymer actuators and widening their application areas.

In this paper, a model-free control framework is proposed to control the tip force of a cantilevered trilayer CPA and similar cantilevered smart actuators. The proposed control method eliminates the requirement of modeling the CPAs in controller design for each application, and it is based on the online local estimation of the actuator dynamics. Due to the fact that the controller has few parameters to tune, this control method provides a relatively easy design and implementation process for the CPAs as compared to other model-free controllers. Although it is not vital, in order to optimize the controller performance, a meta-heuristic particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, which utilizes an initial baseline model that approximates the CPAs dynamics, is used. The performance of the optimized controller is investigated in simulation and experimentally. Successful results are obtained with the proposed controller in terms of control performance, robustness, and repeatability as compared with a conventional optimized PI controller.

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