Manufacture of butterfly robot by designable 3D shape IPMC fabrication method

Abstract

The Ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) actuator is a representative polymer actuator. Useful properties include high responsiveness, the capacity to be driven by low voltage, longevity and the ability to operate in water. However, almost all of the commercially available IPMC actuators are flat films. Because of this, most of the conventional biomimetic robots which use IPMC consist of rectangular IPMC actuators. In this paper, we manufactured a butterfly shaped IPMC actuators by a fabrication method for designable 3D shape IPMC actuators that we have proposed. The butterfly robot had several wings with different resonant frequencies and each wing was able to flap separately by sinusoidal wave voltage which included the same resonant frequency of the wing. Also the wings could flap simultaneously by combinational sinusoidal wave voltage.