Applications of conducting polymers: robotic fins and other devices

Conducting polymers are becoming viable engineering materials and are gradually being integrated into a wide range of devices. Parallel efforts conducted to characterize their electromechanical behavior, understand the factors that affect actuation performance, mechanically process films, and address the engineering obstacles that must be overcome to generate the forces and displacements required in real-world applications have made it possible to begin using conducting polymers in devices that cannot be made optimal using traditional actuators and materials. The use of conducting polymers has allowed us to take better advantage of biological architectures for robotic applications and has enabled us to pursue the development of novel sensors, motors, and medical diagnostic technologies. This paper uses the application of conducting polymer actuators to a biorobotic fin for unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) as a vehicle for discussing the efforts in our laboratory to develop conducting polymers into a suite of useful actuators and engineering components.