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  4. Rollable Multisegment Dielectric Elastomer Minimum Energy Structures for a Deployable Microsatellite Gripper
 
research article

Rollable Multisegment Dielectric Elastomer Minimum Energy Structures for a Deployable Microsatellite Gripper

Araromi, Seun  
•
Gavrilovich, Irina
•
Shintake, Jun  
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2015
IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics

Debris in space presents an ever-increasing problem for spacecraft in Earth orbit. As a step in the mitigation of this issue, the CleanSpace One (CSO) microsatellite has been proposed. Its mission is to perform active debris removal of a decommissioned nanosatellite (the CubeSat SwissCube). An important aspect of this project is the development of the gripper system that will entrap the capture target. We present the development of rollable dielectric elastomer minimum energy structures (DEMES) as the main component of CSO's deployable gripper. DEMES consist of a prestretched dielectric elastomer actuator membrane bonded to a flexible frame. The actuator finds equilibrium in bending when the prestretch is released and the bending angle can be changed by the application of a voltage bias. The inherent flexibility and lightweight nature of the DEMES enables the gripper to be stored in a rolled-up state prior to deployment. We fabricated proof-of-concept actuators of three different geometries using a robust and repeatable fabrication methodology. The resulting actuators were mechanically resilient to external deformation, and display conformability to objects of varying shapes and sizes. Actuator mass is less than 0.65 g and all the actuators presented survived the rolling-up and subsequent deployment process. Our devices demonstrate a maximum change of bending angle of more than 60° and a maximum gripping (reaction) force of 2.2 mN for a single actuator.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/TMECH.2014.2329367
Web of Science ID

WOS:000352060700043

Author(s)
Araromi, Seun  
Gavrilovich, Irina
Shintake, Jun  
Rosset, Samuel  
Richard, Muriel  
Gass, Volker  
Shea, Herbert  
Date Issued

2015

Publisher

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc

Published in
IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics
Volume

20

Issue

1

Start page

438

Subjects

Active Debris Removal (ADR)

•

Artificial Muscles

•

Deployable Mechanism

•

Dielectric Elastomer Actuator (DEA)

•

Space Debris

•

Soft Robotics

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

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Available on Infoscience
July 17, 2014
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/105113
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