Résumé
Designing high-fidelity tactile display devices is linked to actuators'sizing and integration. Well known mature actuation technologies have limitations that do not allow to satisfy all the requirements in terms performances (e.g. bandwidth, time response, closed-loop controllability, output force and displacement amplitudes, resolution, etc.). This is true peculiarly for those devised as matrices in which taxels are arranged in a number of arrays and rows. Additional limiting design issues are commonly the size, the weight, the inclusive integration (for instance with thermal and force feedback), the power supply, etc. New actuator technologies appeared recently and have potential in solving the above cited drawbacks: the most relevant ones are termed artificial muscles. This generic term gathers a number of variant technologies and among them the polymer actuators family. This chapter reviews the scope of polymer actuators and their potential use in designing tactile displays. The chapter discusses their assets, limitations, and the recent advances in this research topic, as well as the latest developments of tactile devices prototypes that are proposed by using this novel technology. Special attention is paid for the most promising of them that are: the dielectric and the conjugated polymer actuators. The last received particular consideration and have been thoroughly considered in the frame of the TOUCH-HapSys project.