Increasing Performance of Soft Dielectric Elastomer Artificial Muscles Via Nanomaterial Composite Electrical Insulators

The field of soft robotics has seen exponential growth over the last decade mainly because the boundaries of various type of actuators are being constantly expanded. While hydraulic and pneumatic actuators are still popular, the bulkiness of their support equipment (e.g., pumps and valves) have limited their real-world application. There has been a lot of focus on using dielectric elastomer actuators for soft flexible robotics because of recent advances in the field for combating their low breakdown voltage and electrical permittivity problems. In order to combat their main disadvantage of low output forces, nanomaterial composite electrical insulators were added to increase the dielectric constant of the actuator. This resulted in a 72% increase in the maximum force output over controlled insulator samples. Further studies on nanomaterial composite insulator design and their relationship with applied voltage are also presented.