Smart materials have been widely used for control actuation. In this paper, we present a microscale position control system using a novel electroactive polymer (EAP). We built a third-order model based on the system identification of the EAP actuator with an autoregressive moving average with exogenous input (ARMAX) method using a chirp signal input from 0.01 Hz to 1 Hz with the magnitude limit...

Presented in this paper is a bi-directional out-of-plane actuator which combines the merits of the electrostatic repulsive principle and the electrostatic attractive principle. By taking advantage of the electrostatic repulsive mode, the common “pull-in” instability can be lessened to enlarge the displacement, and by applying the electrostatic attractive mode, the out-of-plane displacement is f...

An electro-conjugate fluid (ECF) is a kind of functional fluid, which produces a jet flow (ECF jet) when subjected to high DC voltage. This study introduces the ECF jet to develop a novel inchworm like in-pipe mobile robot which mainly consists of two clamping units (a clamping actuator, an ECF jet generator and an ECF tank) and a propelling unit (a propelling actuator, an ECF jet generator and...

Traditional MEMS actuators have limited stroke and force characteristics. This paper describes the development of a hybrid actuation solution, which utilizes a micro-machined actuator array to provide switching of mechanical motion of a larger mesoscale piezo-electric actuator. One motivating application of this technology is the development of a tactile display, where discrete mechanical actua...

A 3-PRR flexure based mechanism which is used as a redundant mechanism providing only x-y micro positioning is designed and controlled in this paper. The aim of this work is to eliminate the unpredictable motions due to manufacturing and assembling errors by implementing sliding mode control (SMC) with disturbance observer (DOB) using piezoelectric actuator models. The system is designed to be ...

The present study experimentally investigated a new hybrid cooling scheme by combination of a microchannel heat sink with a micro-synthetic jet actuator. The heat sink consisted of a single rectangular microchannel measured 550 μm wide, 500 μm deep and 26 mm long. The synthetic jet actuator with a 100 μm diameter orifice was placed right above the microchannel and 5 mm downstream from the chann...

The performance of a chaotic micro resonator is improved by redesigning a quadratic controller reported in a previous study. The chaotic micro resonator is composed of an electrostatic actuator and a voltage regulator (controller). The actuator is made of cantilever beam electrode above a fixed electrode. The actuator voltage, and consequently the electrostatic force magnitude, is controlled to...