This technical report presents the recent progress in the design and construction of a closed loop automated seating system. Preliminary test results are reported. The system is designed to measure seating surface forces and control the seating surface geometry of a seated human. It uses force information as feedback to determine custom seating contours which produce desired seating characteris...

This paper presents a modular approach to motion control using a microconlroller-based stepper motor driver. As an application of the driver, an inexpensive and portable one-dimensional robot was built to automate an existing experimental setup for measurement of adsorption isotherms using the McBain-Bakr technique. Automatic recording of position versus time yields data for the sludy of adsorp...

Designs are constructed that limit the number of treatment combinations within subsets of factors. Such designs came to our attention in the context of machine assembly experiments [1,2]. For example, to improve a stepper motor, we plan a 2 design to investigate four rotor factors and a similar 2 design to investigate four stator factors. The product of these two arrays to study the eight facto...

We study a wide-field motion-sensitive neuron in the visual system of the blowfly Calliphora vicina. By rotating the fly on a stepper motor outside in a wooded area, and along an angular motion trajectory representative of natural flight, we stimulate the fly's visual system with input that approaches the natural situation. The neural response is analysed in the framework of information theory,...

A method capable of delivering relative optical path length metrology with nanometer precision is demonstrated. Unlike conventional dual-wavelength metrology, which employs heterodyne detection, the method developed in this work utilizes direct detection of interference fringes of two He-Ne lasers as well as a less precise stepper motor open-loop position control system to perform its measureme...

This paper presents the design concept of a new spherical stepper robotic wrist motor capable of three degrees of freedom (DOF) motion in a single joint. The spherical wrist motor has significant potential applications where the demands on wrist torque and workspace are low but high speed manipulation of end-effector orientation is required continuously in all directions. Typical applications a...

The modeling and simulation of the electromechanical behaviour of stepper motors are of high interest because they are often used for space application. A commercially available multibody dynamic simulation software, which sets up the equations of motion and the transfer function of the motor and solves them numerically, was used. The results show, that both the dynamic simulation software and ...