Engineering education in fluidics means to convey the physical principles behind pneumatic or hydraulic building blocks such as valves or cylinders. Up to now fluidic hardware plays an important role in this connection: Education laboratories with semi-professional components are used to build up small circuits and to perform experiments respecting hydraulic and pneumatic laws of nature. Based ...

A novel fluidic thrust-vectoring (FTV) control method based on dual synthetic jets actuator (DSJA) is proposed and evaluated. Numerical simulations are governed by the compressible Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) equations. According to results, DSJA capable of deflecting a primary jet with velocity 100 m/s height 50 mm approximately 18 degrees momentum coefficient 1.96%. It pr...

This paper reports on the first gymnastic robot that can perform back handspring. The robot is a planar and serially connected four-link robot, with its joints actuated by electric servomotors. The paper describes the modeling of the robot and the control framework for a back handspring. The controller is derived from a task-specific reference model and its model matching. The use of a referenc...

Approaching and kicking the ball toward the goal is the very essence of robotic soccer. However, for humanoid robots, it is hard to make a fast and stable kick as it includes large momentum changes while standing on a single foot. Simple keyframe based approaches tend to fail due to differences between robots or external perturbations, so they need to be executed slowly. Slow execution increase...

In this paper, a nonlinear controller is proposed to handle some nonlinear control problems. In this scheme, the controller uses the system error, the integral of the system error, and the derivative of the system error as its inputs but the mapping from the inputs to the output is nonlinear. The corresponding nonlinear mapping may be specified based on the control requirement. Therefore, the p...

The viscous flow in the fluidic amplifier is simulated numerically based on CFD technology, and many tests have been done to verify the numerical precision. The results show that the calculated data are good agreement with the experimental data. So the numerical simulation of the viscous flow in the fluidic amplifier is accurate and reliable, and it can be applied to investigate the steady flow...

A compact model to compute flowrate and pressure in micro-fluidic devices is presented. The micro-fluidic flow can be driven by either an applied electric field or by a pressure gradient or both. In the proposed compact model, the complex fluidic network is simplified by using an electrical circuit. The compact model can predict the flowrate, pressure distribution and other basic characteristic...

A family of self-aligning micromachined fluidic couplers are presented here. Bulk micromachined and DRIE processed silicon structures have been investigated as a means of providing external connections via fused silica capillaries for MEMS fluidic devices. These couplings can have arbitrary geometry, ensuring compatibility with most fluidic ports. In addition, performance exceeds typical requir...

Fluctuations in flow rate invariably occur in microfluidic devices. This fluidic instability results in a deteriorating performance and the suspension of their unique functions occasionally. In this study, a fluidic-LPF (low pass filter), which is composed of an ACU (air compliance unit) and a FCSP (fluidic channel with high fluidic resistance for sufficient preload), has been proposed for prov...