Attaining a controlled output strain and utilizing a full potential of active material are the significant factors to design Terfenol-D actuator devises such as active damping devices, high speed hydraulic valve actuators, large-force linear motors and large torque rotating motors. To achieve this, a high magnetic biasing field is required in an actuator. The present work attempts to propose a ...

Parallel mechanisms driven by fixed linear actuators promise high speed and high output, thanks to lightweight movable parts. Several types of mechanism applying this mechanical principle are already known. Although these have different methods of actuator arrangement, they may be considered the same mechanism since they can be treated using the same kinematics. However, it is not known how the...

|Glaucoma is an eye disease which is caused by abnormal high IOP (Intra Ocular Pressure) in the eye. The use of implants is increasing in these days in order to treat the glaucoma. However, though conventional implants have a capability of pressure regulation, they cannot maintain IOPs desired for di erent patients. To solve these problems, it is needed to develop a new implant which is capable...

In this paper, we study optimal actuator location of the minimum norm controls for a multi-dimensional heat equation with control defined in the space L2( × (0, T )). The actuator domain is time-varying in the sense that it is only required to have a prescribed Lebesgue measure for any moment. We select an optimal actuator location so that the optimal control takes its minimal norm over all pos...

Soft robotic systems generally require both soft actuators and soft sensors to perform complex functions. Separate actuators and sensors are often combined into one composite device when proprioception (self-sensing) is required. In this article, we introduce the concept of using a conductive liquid to perform both the sensing and actuation functions of a proprioceptive soft actuator. The worki...

We have developed a newly designed non-explosive release actuator that can replace currently used release devices. The release mechanism is based on a separation mechanism, which relies on segmented nuts and a shape memory alloy (SMA) wire trigger. A quite fast and simple trigger operation is made possible through the use of SMA wire. This actuator is designed to allow a high preload with low l...

For various reasons as discussed for instance in [1], the selection of actuator and sensor positions is still ad hoc. This is especially true for exible structures where many candidate con gurations can exist. This study is an attempt to make the selection process more methodical. One approach to actuator and sensor placement is to optimize a closed loop performance metric directly by selecting...

In this article, auctions are used to improve the recent information mesh (iMesh) based distance sensitive service discovery in the wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs), thus improving overall energy efficiency and lifetime of the network. An event that needs a single actuator response is sensed by one of the sensors, which then performs the search for the closest actuator to respond b...

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are a promising soft actuator technology for robotics. Adding robotic functionalities—folding, variable stiffness, and adhesion—into their actuator design is a novel method to create functionalized robots with simplified actuator configurations. We first propose a foldable actuator that has a simple antagonistic DEA configuration allowing bidirectional actu...

To design fault tolerant control systems (FTCS), one of the important issues to consider is whether to recover the original system performance/functionality completely or to accept some degree of performance degradation after occurrence of a fault. What are the consequences if the performance degradation is not taken into consideration and how to take such performance degradation into account i...