Conducting polymers as a class of materials can be used to build a diverse range of devices. Conducting polymer based actuators (muscles), transistors (neurons), strain gages (muscle spindles), force sensors (Golgi tendon organs), light emitting diodes, photodetectors (eyes), batteries and supercapacitors (energy storage), and chemical sensors (noses) can all be manufactured. The range of behav...

Historically, actuators’ redundancy was used to deal with faults occurring suddenly in flight systems. This technique was generally expensive, time consuming and involves increased weight and space in the system. Therefore, nowadays, the on-line fault diagnosis of actuators and accommodation plays a major role in the design of avionic systems. These approaches, known as Fault Tolerant Flight Co...

For a vehicle equipped with active single-wheel steering, brake, drive and suspension systems a nonlinear vehicle model is presented. On the basis of this model an integrated vehicle dynamics control is developed comprising all of the mentioned chassis actuators to control the plane vehicle motion. The basic control strategy consists in two parts. One part is a flatness based tracking controlle...

A conventional feedback control design may result in unsatisfactory performances in the event of malfunctions in actuators, sensors or other components of the system. This paper deals with the analysis and the design of the fault-tolerant control (FTC) in case of actuators and sensors faults. A classification of the FTC methods is proposed and according to the severity of faults affecting the s...

The work reported here combines elements of electromechanics, power electronics and applied control primarily in the analysis, design and control of energy conversion systems. The principal applications focus on systems involving: macro-scale rotating machinery; micro-scale (MEMS) sensors, actuators and energy converters; and flexible structures. In these applications, the dual use of electrome...

Pointing a satellite in the right direction is fundamental to its mission. To stay "alive" it has to point toward the Sun; to talk to Earth and to other satellites, it has to point toward them. The technology for pointing the satellites, called the attitude control system, is traditionally a quite sophisticated combination of sensors, actuators (which move the satellite), and control logic (usu...

Various applications of piezoelectric actuators have been explored over the years. One such application is use of piezoelectric actuators for shape control of structures. In this paper, steering of parabolic antenna by deforming the antenna surface using piezoelectric actuators has been explored. Optimization based on Genetic Algorithm is carried out to find out optimum location, length and app...

Automatic control deals with the development and the implementation of methods leading to automatic decision processes, for the purpose of improving the performance of industrial, biological, socio-economical systems. The basic principle of automatic control is feedback: information on the state of a system is collected (sensors) and actions on a system is exerted (actuators) so as to influence...

A nonlinear optimal control method is developed for magnetostrictive actuators used to actively attenuate plate vibration. Significant improvements in vibration control can be achieved when the magnetostrictive actuators are driven at moderate to high field levels. This results in nonlinearity and hysteresis which cannot be effectively compensated using linear control theory. This issue is addr...