PURPOSE To compare efficacy and safety of holmium:YAG laser and pneumatic lithotripter in the management of ureteral stones. MATERIALS AND METHODS One hundred and twelve patients with 1 to 2 cm ureteral calculi were selected for pneumatic or holmium:YAG laser transurethral ureterolithotripsy (56 patients in each group). Ultrasonography and plain abdominal x-ray were performed for all the pati...

This paper reports on the use of a new actuator, called Pleated Pneumatic Artificial Muscle, in a one dimensional set-up, it is build as a footless leg with only the knee powered by a pair of Pleated Pneumatic Artificial Muscles. The main goal of this study is the evaluation of the adaptable passive behaviour of these Artificial Muscles in a leg, which can be exploited for an energy efficient w...

This paper presents a hybrid energy storage system based on Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES), where the extraction of energy is done within maximum efficiency conditions. As the maximum efficiency conditions impose the level of converted power, an intermittent time-modulated operation mode is applied to the thermodynamic converter to obtain a variable converted power. A smoothly variable ou...

Pneumatic muscle is a new type of flexible actuator with advantages in terms of light weight, large output power/weight ratio, good security, low price and clean. In this paper, an ankle rehabilitation robot with two degrees of freedom driven by pneumatic muscle is studied. The force control method with an impedance controller in outer loop and a position inner loop is proposed. The demand of r...

Traditionally the control of pneumatic actuators has been limited to movement between pre-set stops or switches. Modern pneumatic systems exhibit great power to weight ratio, are backdrivable and can be precision controlled. As such these actuators offer great advantages over direct drive electric motors for robotic devices. Increasingly robots are required to interact directly with humans requ...

This paperproposes an energy saving approach io the control ofpneumaiic servo systems. The control meihodology is presenied, followed by experimental results ihai indicate significani energetic savings and esseniially no compromise in tracking performance relative to a purely active approach. Speci$cally, experiments indicaie an energv savings of 10 to 46% (depending on the desired tracking fre...

In recent years, Japanese society has been aging, engendering a labor shortage of young workers. Robots are therefore expected to perform tasks such as rehabilitation, nursing elderly people, and day-to-day work support for elderly people. The pneumatic balloon actuator is a rubber artificial muscle developed for use in a robot hand in such environments. This actuator has a long stroke and a hi...

Pneumatic Artificial Muscle (PAM) overcome the other common actuators as it has higher power-to-weight ratio. However, the air compressibility and lack of damping ability of PAM brings dynamic delay to the pressure response and causes oscillatory motion to occur. It is not easy to realize the motion with high accuracy and high speed due to all the non-linear characteristics of pneumatic system....

Sensitive amino acid composition and chirality analysis is demonstrated using the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA), a portable microfabricated capillary electrophoresis (CE) instrument. The MOA integrates all high voltage power supplie s, pneumatic controls, and fluorescence detection optics. The microfabricated device is a novel multi-layer structure combining glass separation channels [1] and micr...

Pneumatic technology has been successfully applied for over two millennia. Even today, pneumatic cylinder based technology forms the keystone of many manufacturing processes where there is a need for simple, high-speed, low-cost, reliable motion. But when the system requires accurate control of position, velocity or acceleration profiles, these actuators form a far from satisfactory solution. B...