An experimental study on controlling a fast response SMA-actuated rotary actuator

Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) applications as actuators have been increased nowadays due to their large force-to-mass ratio, light-weight, and noiseless operation. Therefore, in this paper a rotary actuator actuated by a pair of antagonistic SMA wires is controlled for trajectory tracking purposes. In addition, a set-up is designed to validate the controller performance with experimental data. The results indicate that the rotary actuator controlled via PID method is able to track the reference inputs accurately even in high frequency bandwidth (5 Hz). The latter achievement is a big step in improving the speed of SMA-actuated systems.