<title>Electrostatically stricted polymers (ESSP)</title>

Miniature, lightweight, miser actuators that operate similar to biological muscles can be used to develop robotic devices with unmatched capabilities and impact many technology areas. Electroactive polymers (EAP) offer the potential to producing such actuators and their main attractive feature is their ability to induce relatively large bending or longitudinal strain. Generally, these materials produce a relatively low force and the applications that can be considered at the current state of the art are relatively limited. While improved material are being developed there is a need for methods to develop longitudinal actuators that can contract similar to muscles. In addition, it is desirable to have these actuators in a fiber form that can be bundled to provide the necessary characteristics of stiffness, fracture toughness, resilience and large force actuation. To address this need efforts were made to develop both the material basis as well as the electromechanical modeling of the actuator.