An overview on innovative mechatronic actuators based on smart materials

In recent years, smart materials have proven to represent an effective means for developing a novel generation of miniaturized electro-mechanical transducers. Thanks to their many features such as high energy density and efficiency, low power requirement, low cost, scalability, and high compactness, smart material can help improving the performance of several mechatronics systems, ranging from industrial applications to biomedical and bio-inspired ones. A wide spectrum of different smart materials, each one having unique features and limitations, is currently available. This paper aims at presenting three specific types of smart materials which have shown to be particularly suitable for micropositioning applications, i.e., shape memory alloys, magnetic shape memory alloys, and dielectric elastomers. These materials exhibits complementary characteristics in terms of stress, strain, and bandwidth which make them particularly suitable for different applications. In this paper, these three smart materials are discussed in details, and major features, challenges, and applications are highlighted.