**7. References**


Favieiro, G.; Balbinot, A. & Barreto, M.M.G. (2011). Decoding arm movements by myoeletric signals and artificial neural networks. *Proceedings of Biosignals and Biorobotics Conferecene (BRC) 2011*, pp. 1-6, Vitória, ISSNIP, 2011.

**Chapter 15** 

© 2012 Jain et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2012 Jain et al., licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**Design and Control of an EMG Driven IPMC** 

The medical, rehabilitation and bio-mimetic technology demands human actuated devices which can support in the daily life activities such as functional assistance or functional substitution of human organs. These devices can be used in the form of prosthetic, skeletal and artificial muscles devices (Andreasen et al., 2005; Bitzer & Smagt, 2006; DoNascimento et al., 2008). However, we still have some difficulties in the practical use of these devices. The major challenges to overcome are the acquisition of the user's intention from his or her bionic signals and to provide with an appropriate control signal for the device. Also, we need to consider the mechanical design issues such as lightweight and small size with flexible behavior etc (Arieta et al., 2006; Shenoy et al., 2008). For the bionic signals, the electromyography (EMG) signal can be used to control these devices, which reflect the muscles motion, and can be acquired from the body surface. We are familiar with the fact that ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) has tremendous potential as an artificial muscle. This can be stimulated by supplying a small voltage of ±3V and shows evidence of a large bending behavior (Shahinpoor & Kim, 2001; 2002; 2004; Bar-Cohen, 2002). In place of the supply voltage from external source for actuating an IPMC, EMG signal can be used where EMG electrodes show a reliable approach to extract voltage signal from body (Jain et al. 2010a; 2010b; 2011). Using this voltage signal via EMG sensor, IPMC can illustrate the biomimetic behavior through the movement of human muscles. Therefore, an IPMC is used as

The main objective of this chapter is to discuss the design and control of an IPMC based artificial muscle finger where this finger is actuated by EMG signal via movement of human finger. The movement is sensed by EMG sensor which provides signal for actuating the IPMC. When designing IPMC artificial muscle finger based micro gripper for handling the light weight components in an assembly, IPMC bending behaviour is utilized to hold the

**Based Artificial Muscle Finger** 

R.K. Jain, S. Datta and S. Majumder

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/48814

**1. Introduction** 

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

an artificial muscle finger for the bio-mimetic/micro robot.

