In this paper, we present a controller design for servoing the position of a parallel-plate electrostatic microactuator beyond its open-loop instability point. Controller design considers nonlinearities from both the parallel-plate actuator and the parallel-plate position sensor, to ensure robust stability within the feedback loop. Desired transient response is achieved by a pre-filter added in...

A flexible microactuator (FMA) driven by an electro-pneumatic (or electro-hydraulic) system has been developed. The FMA has three degrees of freedom: pitch, yaw, and stretch; and these are suitable movements for miniature robotic mechanisms such as fingers, arms or legs. The construction is of fiber-reinforced rubber and the mechanism is very simple. Gentle miniature robots with no conventional...

Dual-stage actuator design for hard disk drives via composite nonlinear feedback control is presented, which consists of a primary actuator, the voice coil motor and a secondary actuator, the suspension piezoelectric microactuator. The first is effective in both track seeking and following stages to produce fast rising time and low overshoot and the latter works in track following stage only to...

This paper reports a monolithic, force-feedback MEMS (microelectomechanical systems) microgripper and its application to micro-scale compression testing of swollen hydrogel microcapsules at wet state during manipulation. The single-chip microgripper integrates an electrothermal microactuator and two capacitive force sensors, one for contact detection (force resolution: 38.5 nN) and the other fo...