Recent research proposes dielectric elastomers as actuators for mechanical suppression of pathological tremor.Dielectric elastomers o er several advantages compared to traditional actuators, including decreased weight,smaller pro le, reduced rigidity, and better scalability. The similarities between dielectric elastomers and humanmuscle enable application of the actuators in a bio-inspired approach, where external arti cial muscles directlyactuate against tremor produced by the underlying human muscle. Two approaches exist for dielectric-elastomerbasedtremor suppression: fully-active and tremor-active. In the fully-active approach, the dielectric elastomeractuators must actuate against tremor while also activating to follow the voluntary motion of the joint. Incontrast, the tremor-active approach only requires activation against the tremor; the human sensorimotor systemcompensates for the passive dynamics of the dielectric elastomers. The tremor-active approach is unique todielectric-elastomer-based tremor suppression since the soft actuators can have mechanical impedances on thesame order or less than that of the human body. These two approaches have tradeo s between actuationand viscoelastic requirements: the tremor-active approach decreases the actuation requirements, but applieslimitations to the sti ness and viscoelastic characteristics of the actuator. This paper quanti es the necessaryactuator parameters to achieve acceptable tremor suppression performance for each approach. The necessaryparameters are normalized by joint parameters to generalize the results for tremor suppression about any joint.
展开▼
