Modeling of the dynamic hysteresis in DEAP actuator using an empirical mode decomposition based long-short term memory network

As a smart material-based actuator, the dielectric electro-active polymer (DEAP) actuator is widely considered to be a potential driving mechanism for many applications, especially in intelligent bio-inspired robotics. However, the DEAP actuator demonstrates rate-dependent and asymmetrical hysteresis phenomenon which leads to great tracking inaccuracy and even oscillatory response, severely limiting its further development. Feedforward Neural Network (FNN) model has already become a widely used method to describe this kind of strong hysteresis nonlinearity in recent years. However, the FNN has no ability to remember the historical state of long period of time which is also a very important factor to restrict hysteresis phenomenon. In this paper, a novel hybrid model, Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) network combined with Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), is proposed to model the dynamic hysteresis nonlinearity in DEAP actuator. At first, the original control signal sequence is preprocessed into a series of sub-sequence by the EMD method and is reshaped by one-sided dead-zone operator. Then the input space of LSTM is conducted using the original control signal, the sub-sequence, and reshaped signal. Finally, the input space and the displacement signal are applied to train the long-short term memory network. In order to verify the performance of the proposed model, the traditional artificial back propagation neural network (BPNN) model, rate-dependent Prandtl-Ishlinskii (RPI) model, and nonlinear electromechanical (NEM) model are compared from prediction accuracy. The results demonstrate that: (1) the proposed model has a higher prediction accuracy than the traditional artificial BPNN, RPI, and NEM model; and (2) the prediction accuracy of LSTM network is significantly improved by using EMD. Therefore, the long-short term memory network combined with empirical mode decomposition is a competitive method compared to the existing state-of-the-art approach.