Tactile feedback is useful in performing many robot manipulator tasks. This paper describes the simple touch sensor used on the robot manipulator at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. This sensor has a range of 1 to 80 ounces with a resolution of about 0.2 ounces at the low end of the scale. It is inexpensive, easy to construct, and relatively free of hysteresis, drift and fatigue. Also, the o...

Cell membranes behave like electrical capacitors and changes in cell capacitance therefore reflect changes in the cell area. Monitoring capacitance can thus be used to study dynamic cellular phenomenon involving rapid changes in cell surface, such as exo- and/or endocytosis. In this review focus is on the use of capacitance techniques to study exocytosis in human neutrophils. We compare the who...

introduction: human embryonic stem cells (hescs) are pluripotent cells that can proliferate and differentiate to many cell types. their electrophysiological properties have not yet been chracterzed. in this study, the passive properties (such as resting membrane potential, input resistance and capacitance) and the contribution of delayed rectifier k+ channel currents to the membrane conductance...

A novel method for measuring very small capacitance changes based on capacitance-to-phase angle conversion is introduced in this article. This new method is the improved or linearized version of the nonlinear capacitance-to-phase angle conversion method. The main features of this scheme are the very good linearity, extremely high stray immunity and a very high resolution. The experimental resul...

A high-speed capacitance difference-to-sum ratio measurement circuit is presented for differential capacitance transducers. It consists of a switched-capacitor input stage, two sample-and-hold (S/H) circuits followed by voltage-to-current (V/I) converters, and a current-ratio-controlled relaxation oscillator. This circuit offers a square-wave output whose oscillation period is directly proporti...