20 Extending Applications of Dielectric Elastomer Artificial Muscles to Wireless Communication Systems (original) (raw)

Electro active polymers (EAPs) are used for actuators that can electrically control their motions to resemble those of actual muscles. Thus, they are called artificial muscles. In addition, since EAPs are often made of flexible materials, they have also come to be called “soft actuators” in recent years. There are many types of EAPs such as dielectric elastomers (Perline & Chiba, 1992a), ionic polymer-metal composites (Oguro et al., 1999), electroconductive Polymers (Otero & Sansinera, 1998), and ion polymer gels (Osada et al., 1992b). Figure 1 shows typical EAPs.