  In order to fully harness the potential of dielectric elastomer actu-ators
(DEAs) in soft robots, advanced control methods are need-ed. An important
groundwork for this is the development of a control-oriented model that can
adequately describe the underly-ing dynamics of a DEA. A common feature of
existing models is that always custom-made DEAs were investigated. This makes
the modelling process easier, as all specifications and the struc-ture of the
actuator are well known. In the case of a commercial actuator, however, only
the information from the manufacturer is available and must be checked or
completed during the modelling process. The aim of this paper is to explore how
a commercial stacked silicone-based DEA can be modelled and how complex the
model should be to properly replicate the features of the actu-ator. The static
description has demonstrated the suitability of Hooke's law. In the case of
dynamic description, it is shown that no viscoelastic model is needed for
control-oriented modelling. However, if all features of the DEA are considered,
the general-ized Kelvin-Maxwell model with three Maxwell elements shows good
results, stability and computational efficiency.

Robotics