This paper presents the design and evaluation of a high force density fishbone shaped electrostatic comb drive actuator. This comb drive actuator has a branched structure similar to a fishbone, which is intended to increase the capacitance of the electrodes and hence increase the electrostatic actuation force. Two-dimensional finite element analysis was used to simulate the motion of the fishbo...

piezoelectric actuators are widely used in micro manipulation applications. however hysteresis nonlinearity limits accuracy of these actuators. this paper presents a novel approach utilizing a piezoelectric nano-stage as slave manipulator of a teleoperation system. the prandtl-ishlinskii (pi) model is used to model actuator hysteresis in feedforward scheme to cancel out this nonlinearity. a pas...

An inchworm-type micro-motion robot (inchworm) is studied for the application of positioning devices or moving mechanism in a small production system. The inchworm consists electromagnets clamp and piezoelectric actuators mechanism, has an unlimited operating area based on principle inchworm. drive frequency limited by transient phenomenon actuator. In this paper, displacement actuator extended...

Mechanical properties of biological tissue represent important diagnostic information and are of histological relevance (hard lesions, "nodes" in organs: tumors; calcifications in vessels: arteriosclerosis). The problem is, that such information is usually obtained by digital palpation only, which is limited with respect to sensitivity. It requires intuitive assessment and does not allow quanti...

Conducting polymer-based micro-actuators are of great interest in soft MEMS as they exhibit large strains and forces response to electrical stimulation. To date, these have very often been characterized by applying low frequency voltage extract the electromechanical characteristics. However, many applications require maintaining actuator’s position for several minutes. A micro-camera tracking d...

This paper presents an innovative 3D piezoelectric ultrasonic actuator using a single flexural vibration ring transducer, for machine vision and robot guidance industrial applications. The proposed actuator is principally aiming to overcome the visual spotlight focus angle of digital visual data capture transducer, digital cameras and enhance the machine vision system ability to perceive and mo...

Research and development on actuators has been accelerated with the aid of virtual prototyping software, like ANSYS. This is illustrated with two successful cases using ANSYS to design and optimize micro-electromechanical actuators. The first case is topology optimization of head suspension assembly for hard disk drive. The second case is design optimization of polymeric thermal micro-actuator....

This paper presents design, fabrication, and characterization of easy-to-handle electroplated nickel microgrippers with SU-8 adaptors for heterogeneous micro/nano assembly applications. Two distinctive designs of microgrippers as end-effectors of micro/nano assembly applications have been developed in this work. The first design is 200 lm thick electroplated nickel microgripper with a plastic m...

Hard Exoskeletons and arm actuators have already been designed and available in industry but they are expensive, heavy and cumbersome so to reduce these drawbacks a low cost lightweight intelligent arm actuator has been designed, constructed and evaluated. It consists of a pneumatic artificial muscle, constructed using a football bladder and covered by parachute material to limit its expansion....