Repetitive control of a trilayer conjugated polymer actuator

This paper investigates the dynamics of a polypyrrole-based conducting electroactive polymer actuator which is desired to track repeating reference commands for position control applications. A proportional-integral (PI) control assisted plug-in repetitive controller is proposed and implemented to improve the tracking performance of the polypyrrole actuator. The response of the system with repetitive controller is then compared to the system response which is solely obtained by the implementation of the PI controller. The results show that the repetitive controller improves the tracking performance of the actuator significantly and reduces the steady-state tracking errors compared to the stand-alone PI controller.