Position control of ionic polymer metal composite actuator based on neuro-fuzzy system

This paper describes the application of Neuro-Fuzzy techniques for controlling an IPMC cantilever configuration under water to improve tracking ability for an IPMC actuator. The controller was designed using an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Controller (ANFC). The measured input data based including the tip-displacements and electrical signals have been recorded for generating the training in the ANFC. These data were used for training the ANFC to adjust the membership functions in the fuzzy control algorithm. The comparison between actual and reference values obtained from the ANFC gave satisfactory results, which showed that Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy algorithm is reliable in controlling IPMC actuator. In addition, experimental results show that the ANFC performed better than the pure fuzzy controller (PFC). Present results show that the current adaptive neuro-fuzzy controller can be successfully applied to the real-time control of the ionic polymer metal composite actuator for which the performance degrades under long-term actuation.