Electroactive polymers have been studied for artificial muscle applications in last decades. One of the EAP materials, 3M VHB acrylic tapes, have shown been outstanding electromechanical coupling performance. The scope of this study is to understand the electromechanical properties of VHB acrylic material. In addition, the research explores new practical designs of soft actuators. The basic des...

This article describes the design of a high-bandwidth, iron-less, recoil-based electromagnetic vibrotactile actuator. Its working principle, the theoretical analysis, the method used to determine its transfer function, its scaling properties and its design constraints are discussed along with its fabrication and possible improvements.

Unit quaternion is an ideal parameterization for joint rotations. However, due to the complexity of the geometry of S group, it’s hard to specify meaningful joint constraints with unit quaternion. In this paper, we have proposed an effective and accurate method to specify the rotation limits for joints parameterized with the unit quaternion. Joint constrains constructed with our method are adeq...

We address the problem of motion planning for nonholonomic cooperating mobile robots manipulating and transporting objects while holding them in a stable grasp. We present a general approach for solving optimal control problems based on the calculus of variations. We specialize this approach to solving the motion planning problem and obtaining trajectories and actuator forces/torques for any ma...

This paper proposes an anti-wind up double hyperbolic sliding mode controller (AWDH-SMC) in the presence of torque constraints for a three-legged robot. The legged robot's dynamics are nonlinear, hybrid and complex. Based on challenges mentioned, this study focuses designing (SMC) fully actuated robot to achieve fast tracking convergence. On other hand, torques generated by actuators limited. A...

In this work, we use first principles of kinematics to provide a fundamental insight into mechanical power distribution within multi-actuator machines. Individual actuator powers—not their net sum—determine the efficiency and actuator size of a multi-joint machine. Net power delivered to the environment naturally discards important information about how that power is generated. For example, sim...