Force-Amplified Soft Electromagnetic Actuators

Polypyrrole Soft Actuators

Bi-directional electrothermal electromagnetic actuators

A new breed of in-plane bi-directional MEMS actuators based on controlled electrothermal buckling and electromagnetic Lorentz force has been demonstrated under both dc and ac operations. Experimentally, bi-directional actuators made by the standard surface-micromachining process have a lateral actuation range of several microns and can exert forces over 100 μN, while those made by SOI and Metal...

Soft Pneumatic Actuators for Rehabilitation

Pneumatic artificial muscles are pneumatic devices with practical and various applications as common actuators. They, as human muscles, work in agonistic-antagonistic way, giving a traction force only when supplied by compressed air. The state of the art of soft pneumatic actuators is here analyzed: different models of pneumatic muscles are considered and evolution lines are presented. Then, th...

Vibrotactile using micromachined electromagnetic actuators array

One motivating application of this technology is the development of a tactile display interface, where discrete mechanical actuators apply vibratory excitation at discrete locations on the skin. Specifically, this paper describes the development fabrication and characterization of a 4 x 4 micro-actuator array of vibrating pixels for fingertip tactile communication. The vibrting pixels are gener...

Nonlinear Adaptive Control for Electromagnetic Actuators

The authors study here the problem of adaptive ”soft-landing” control for electromagnetic actuators. The soft landing requires accurate control of the actuator’s moving element between two desired positions. They propose a non-linear adaptive controller to solve the problem of robust trajectory tracking for the moving element, when considering model uncertainties with linear parametrisation. Th...