This paper describes the fabrication and characteristics of an ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) membrane-shaped micro-actuator and its application to the fabrication of a micro-pump. After fabricating two 8mm×8mm IPMC membraneshaped actuators using a Nafion film, their displacements were measured. The fabricated IPMC membrane-shaped micro-actuators showed displacement of 14∼27μm at the appl...

This paper presents a new design of mobile micro manipulation system for robotic micro assembly where a compliant piezoelectric actuator based micro gripper is designed for handling the miniature parts. The compensation of misalignment during robotic peg-in-hole assembly is achieved by this compliant micro gripper because the piezoelectric actuator has capability of producing the displacement i...

In this research, a functionally graded microbeam bonded with piezoelectric layers is analyzed under electric force. Static and dynamic instability due to the electric actuation is studied because of its importance in micro electro mechanical systems, especially in micro switches. In order to prevent pull-in instability, two piezoelectric layers are used as sensor and actuator. A current amplif...

This chapter demonstrates the use of anti-windup compensation in the control loop of a micro-actuator which is nominally controlled by a linear, discrete robust controller. The micro-actuator is part of a hard disk drive dual-stage servo-control system for positioning of the read/write head. The actuator inputs are constrained to retain the micro-actuator’s displacement range of less than 0.4 μ...

Two-dimensional micro-bubble actuator arrays were developed and studied in detail to enhance the hybridization kinetics of a DNA micro-biosensor. The hybridization between a molecular beacon, a kind of oligonucleotide probe, and its complement was investigated in a millimeter-sized PDMS based reaction chamber, where various 2D micro-heater arrays were distributed on the bottom for micro-bubble ...

The nonlinear pull-in behaviors of various electrostatic micro-actuators were simulated. The differential quadrature method (DQM) was applied to overcome the difficulty in solving the nonlinear equation of motion. Various types of micro-actuators, such as the cantilever beam actuator and the fixed-fixed beam actuator were derived and simulated to examine the feasibility of applying the DQM to t...

The design and fabrication of a piezoelectric micro actuator on a silicon diaphragm is presented for application of micro ink jet. We developed the micro devices for the fluid transference that are fabricated using thick film technologies for ceramic materials and Si micro-machining. The performance of drop ejection was shown from the optimal design parameters. It is closely related to the prec...

the present research attempts to explain dynamic pull-in instability of functionally graded micro-cantilevers actuated by step dc voltage while the fringing-field effect is taken into account in the vibrational equation of motion. by employing modern asymptotic approach namely homotopy perturbation method with an auxiliary term, high-order frequency-amplitude relation is obtained, then the infl...

In part I of this paper (previous issue of Robotica) a dual stage system with the coarse and fine actuators is adopted to achieve sub-micron accuracy with a large working space for the proposed new three degree-of-freedom (DOF) miniaturized micro parallel mechanism with high mobility and one type of the architecture with vertical actuator locations in all three legs (C-VV type) among six possib...