The paper describes the process of design and construction of test rigs, whose task will be to measure dynamic characteristics (namely displacement, pressure, force). The test rigs are built for three specific types of soft drives - fluid muscle, DE actuator (dielectric elastomer) and IMPC actuator (ionic polymer metal composite). The measuring devices, which have been assembled at the authors' workplace, will serve to study the displacement in soft drives with the supposed synergistic effect achieved by a comparative approach. These drives exhibit complicated behaviour in terms of displacement control. The test rigs will measure also other non-linear characteristics in the future.
Science Journal 