A Hybrid Model for Photo-responsive Liquid Crystal Elastomer Actuator

Abstract

This paper focuses on the modeling of the photo-responsive liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) actuator, which is essential in LCE-based light-driven soft robot applications. The goal is to provide a strategy to model the deformation of the photo-responsive LCE actuator under a certain input. By analyzing the deformation principle, a modeling scheme is proposed to divide the LCE model into two separate models connected in series. The first model describes the temperature variation under the input, and the second model depicts the deformation of the actuator. As a demonstration, a hybrid model for the photo-responsive LCE actuator is proposed, consisting of a dynamic Hammerstein-Wiener model and a static physics-based deformation model. Experiments are carried out for verification of the proposed work.