Mechanical Design and Control of a High-Bandwidth Shape Memory Alloy Tactile Display
Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics V
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To get a good dynamic response from a thermomechanical actuator while not destroying the heating element is a common challenge. Actuators are usually driven by a PWM signal whose duty cycle determines the power transferred to the actuator. This involves the operation of the semiconductor devices as power switches. The thermal response of these devices is characterized by parameters like the thermal resistance or the thermal impedance. Device manufacturers include these data in the datasheets and some give an RC ladder model to allow the simulation of the thermal behavior with an electrical simulator like SPICE. This procedure can be extended to the thermomechanical actuators to characterize them in a similar way. Specifically, this paper reports the procedure to obtain an RC model of a thermopneumatic actuator proposed by the authors to be part of a tactile display. The characterization has been carried out with common instrumentation and software tools.