The demand for muscle-like actuators in advanced robotics has, in the last few years, stimulated a growth in research activities on contractile polymer gels and on mechanisms for their electric drive.
In this article, the different classes of polymeric gels which have been shown to be capable of reversible contraction and expansion under physicochemical stimuli are re viewed.
In view of the ongoing development of direct-drive polymeric actuators, continuum and lumped parameter models used to describe their dynamical properties under electrical ex citation are analyzed.
Control schemes for single actuators and computational architectures which have been proposed to command redundant, multiactuator systems are also illustrated.
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