Active polymers: An overview

It can be seen from the above reported research and the scale of the academic interest in active polymer materials, that they have the potential to become an indispensable part of future technological developments. With each polymer having its own niche applications, they are bound to be the materials of future. With growing emphasis on interdisciplinary research, different active materials can be combined to develop tailor-made, multifunctional properties, where single materials can act as sensors, actuators, structural elements, etc. To date, the robotics community has adopted only two major active polymer technologies: dielectric elastomers and ionic polymer-metal composites because the maturity of these two technologies is inevitable. However, other technologies are also quite promising and leaves one the great potentials to use them in robotic applications. Two other technologies that the robotics community is currently considering are conducting polymers and electrostrictive graft elastomers. In later chapters, we will focus on four major active polymer technologies: dielectric elastomers (Chapters 2 and 3), electrostrictive graft elastomers (Chapter 4), conducting polymers (Chapter 5), and ionic polymer-metal composites (Chapters 6-10). We all expect that the robotics community will adopt other promising active polymer materials as their maturity and availability improve.