Energy rearrangement between individual capacitive electrodes

Date

2022

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Tartu Ülikool

Abstract

Soft Robotics is a subfield of robotics that allows safer interactions with humans and opens the door to applications such as wearable healthcare devices where the shape-changing is highly beneficial, such as muscle injury rehabilitation or supportive exosuits. Shape change of the system happens as a result of rearranging matter within the system. The ionic capacitive system is one of the promising ways of shape-changing by matter rearrangement within the system. The matter is rearranged based on the movement of ions, which is triggered by an external supply voltage. The capacitive energy put into the system can later be reused within the same system to reconfigure the shape. However the energy management architecture used in existing ionic capacitive soft robots are not able to reuse the stored energy, which is essential for making the soft robots more power-autonomous. This work proposes a solution using a novel three-electrode system where energy can be rearranged within the individual electrodes in the same system. A bidirectional DC to-DC converter, the Energy Management System (EMS), is used to transfer energy tween individual electrodes, where up to 54% efficiency was achieved

Description

Keywords

Soft Robotics, Ionic Capacitive system, Three-Electrode System, Energy Management System, bidirectional DC-to-DC converter

Citation