Employing a swarm of independently controlled flying micro air vehicles (MAVs) for aerial coverage missions, instead of a single flying robot, increases the robustness and efficiency of the missions. Designing a swarm of MAVs requires addressing new challenges, such as inter-robot collision avoidance and formation control, where individual’s knowledge about the relative location of their local ...

Oriented neuronal networks with controlled connectivity are required for many applications ranging from studies of neurodegeneration to neuronal computation. To build such networks in vitro, an efficient, directed and long lasting guidance of axons toward their target is a pre-requisite. The best guidance achieved so far, however, relies on confining axons in enclosed microchannels, making them...

This report introduces a microfluidic system for manipulation and separation of micron-sized particles based on the combined use of negative dielectrophoresis (DEP) and hydrodynamic forces. A 2-D micro-electrode structure has been constructed on the bottom surface on glass wafer and driven with high-frequency AC voltage to generate dielectrophoretic gates. Depending on the relative strengths of...

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), have been widely utilized and their applications are becoming popular, not only in military or commercial applications, but also for everyday life. Although GPS measurements are the essential information for currently developed land vehicle navigation systems (LVNS), GPS signals are often unavailable or unr...

This paper presents the design and modeling of a new 6-DOF 8-PSS/SPS compliant dual redundant parallel robot with wide-range flexure hinges. This robot can achieve either high accurate positioning or rough positioning as well as a 6-DOF active vibration isolation and excitation to the payload placed on the moving platform. Adopting a kind of wide-range flexure hinge, we establish the kinematics...

Piezoelectric actuators are widely used for precise micro-positioning. In most applications, there is contact with the environment. Sensing external forces is a challenging problem in controlling mechanical systems, especially in micro scales. The external force could cause dual hysteresis non-linearity effects, which will disrupt the actuator positioning accuracy. Therefore, an effective contr...

Hysteresis in smart material actuators makes the effective use of these actuators quite challenging. The Preisach operator has been widely used to model smart material hysteresis. Motivated by positioning applications of smart actuators, this paper addresses the value inversion problem for a class of discretized Preisach operators, i.e., to find an optimal input trajectory given a desired outpu...

The fact that piezoelectric ceramic transducer (PZT) precision drive systems in 3D printing are faced with nonlinear problems with respect to positioning, such as hysteresis and creep, has had an extremely negative impact on the precision of laser focusing systems. To eliminate the impact of PZT nonlinearity during precision drive movement, mathematical modeling and theoretical analyses of each...

This paper mainly discusses a fall detecting method for the elderly, implements the wireless positioning and automatic alarm function. The system is designed with low cost Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) inertial measurement unit to measures activities data of the elderly people, which has achieved an accurate attitude determination by Kalman filter for the multi-sensor data fusion algor...

The design of a tactile shape display intended for Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is presented. It consists of 32 micro brushless motors arranged in a 4-by-8 configuration, and the total size is 27 mm × 20 mm × 18 mm. The main restrictive design parameter is the size of the display as it will be attached to a laparoscopic grasper. Modularity is also crucial since it might be desirable to do e...