Towards a consistent methodology for testing the electromechanical performance of strip polymer composite actuators

Strip actuators have attracted tremendous attention in bionics due to the controllable deformation under various stimuli. However, it is currently hard to compare their performance owing to the different approaches for evaluating their actuation. Most of the studies determine the maximum or average value of the bending angle or strain, the deformation profile of the entire actuator strip was not quantified. In this study, a versatile method was proposed to evaluate the bending profile of typical strip actuators with bending deformation, thus analyzing the actuation performance. This method has been verified by synthetic curves, and less than 2% of global error was found. We have also demonstrated the implementation of this method for examining the actuation of typical strip actuators and showed that it can also be used for comparing the performance of different actuators prepared from other studies.