IPMC is an artificial muscle material. It is very suitable for the development of biomimetic robots as a new actuator. Using of fractional order control can improve the dynamic system control capability. The purpose of this study is to describe the advantages of fractional order control and design optimal fractional order controller for the high fitting degree of IPMC fractional order model. Firstly, integer order PID controller and optimal fractional order controller are designed for the IPMC fractional order drive model. Then, the comparison and analysis of control result shows that rise time is faster and overshoot is smaller of fractional order control. So it proves the control performance of system is significantly improved which is applied of fractional order control method.Finally, the impact of fractional controller parameters changing on the system is analyzed in detail. Therefore the optimal parameters can be selected to achieve optimal fractional order control.