Towards development of next generation solid-state artificial flying muscles using conducting polymers

We report here the fabrication and characterization of solid-state, conducting polymer actuators. The electrochemical activity of polyaniline (PANI) thin film coated with solid-state polyelectrolyte is very similar to the polyaniline thin film in an aqueous solution. The solid-state actuator is adhered to a lever arm of an force transducer and the force generation is measured. The force generated by the actuator is found to be length dependent. However, the overall torques generated by the actuators with different lengths remains essentially the same. The effect of stimulation signals such as voltage, current, on the bending angle and displacement is also studied using square wave potential