Pneumatic actuators are attractive for robotic rehabilitation applications because they are lightweight, powerful, and compliant, but their control has historically been difficult, limiting their use. In this paper we present the pneumatic control system developed for Pneu-WREX: a pneumatically actuated, upper extremity orthosis for rehabilitation after stroke. The developed pneumatic control s...

The actuator line method (ALM) is extensively used in wind turbine and rotor simulations. However, its original uncorrected formulation overestimates the forces near tip of blades does not reproduce well on translating wings. recently proposed vortex-based smearing correction for ALM a based physical mathematical properties simulation that allows more accurate general ALM. So far, to correct bl...

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...

Abstract To improve positioning accuracy in a head-positioning control system for hard disk drives, we have developed a triple-stage-actuator system on a spin-stand tester. In this system, the first stage is a VCM actuator for moving a head-stack assembly, the second stage is a PZT actuator for moving a suspension, and the third stage is a thermal actuator for moving read/write elements. The fr...

This paper presents a “Fingerprint Method” for modeling and subsequently characterizing stochastically controlled actuator arrays. The actuator arrays are built from small actuator cells with structural elasticity. These cells are controlled using a bistable stochastic process wherein all cells are given a common input probability (control) value which they use to determine whether to actuate o...

Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) is a phase contrast technique that provides a non-invasive means of evaluating the viscoelastic properties of soft condensed matter. This has a profound bio-medical significance as it allows for the virtual palpation of areas of the body usually not accessible to the hands of a medical practitioner, such as the brain. Applications of MRE are not restricted ...