Identification and characterization of the out-of-plane resonance in a dielectric elastomer to drive an agile robotic cube

A dielectric elastomer (DE) vibrates and resonates mechanically under an alternating voltage and the vibrations undergo a transition from the in-plane to the out-of-plane state. In this study, a phase diagram was established experimentally to illustrate this transition and an electromechanical model was proposed to predict the transition using the boundary conditions. The resonance frequencies were calculated and were shown to be consistent with the experimentally obtained values. A novel vibration-driven robotic cube was then designed and powered by the dielectric elastomer at the 1st order out-of-plane resonance. The agile robotic cube is ultralight and demonstrated a speedy response of 125 mm/s (1.8 body length/s), which is superior to the locomotive dynamics of the existing DE-based robotic devices.