Design and control of a Nitinol wire actuated rotary servo

Abstract

This paper presents the design and control of a rotary servo actuated by a shape memory alloy (SMA) wire. A new rotary servo device using Nitinol type of SMA wire is designed and fabricated in this study. This new rotary actuator utilizes a Nitinol wire wound on a threaded non-conductive rotor. One end of the Nitinol wire is fixed to the rotor and the other end is fixed to the supporting base plate. The rotor is connected to a pre-tensioned torsional spring such that two-way rotation can be achieved. Upon heating of the Nitinol wire using electric current, the wire contracts, causing the rotor to rotate, since the other end of the SMA wire is rigidly connected to the base plate. This rotor design is compact and offers a space-saving solution for the use of SMA wire actuators. To actively control the servo, a sliding-mode based robust control approach is used. The sliding-mode based robust control consists of three components: a standard proportional plus derivative (PD) control term, a feedforward term used as a bias current, and a robust term to increase system stability and concurrently control accuracy. Experimental results confirm the functionality of the Nitinol wire actuated rotary servo and show this device can be precisely controlled using the sliding-mode based robust control approach.