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This paper investigates a formation control problem for two space vehicles in the vicinity of the L2 libration point of the Sun-Earth/Moon system. The objective is to accurately regulate the relative position vector between the vehicles to a desired configuration, under tight tolerances. It is shown that the formation control problem is solvable using six constant thrust electric actuators requ...

Three different electrothermally-actuated MEMS micromirrors with Cr/Au-Si bimorph actuators are proposed. The devices are fabricated with the SOIMUMPs process developed by MEMSCAP, Inc. (Durham, NC, USA). A silicon-on-insulator MEMS process has been employed for the fabrication of these micromirrors. Electrothermal actuation has achieved a large angular movement in the micromirrors. Application...

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems control and monitor critical infrastructure such as natural gas, oil, water, waste-water, and electric power distribution and transmission systems. SCADA systems consist of a central control center connected to Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) which directly interface with sensors and actuators connected to the physical infrastructure. Most R...

In this article we propose an intelligent system (IS) for automatic movements of a robotic-assisted hospital bed, it is based on posture classification and recognition using mattress pressure sensors. The proposed IS allows to program a sequence of movements of the robotic bed that are executed automatically through electric actuators in response to the pressure distribution of a patient on the...

A method is presented to indirectly measure and shorten carbon nantoubes grown from the tips of atomic force microscope (AFM) probes. The measurement component exploits the nanotubes ability to elastically buckle and requires only those signals and actuators available on a standard AFM. The shortening operation is facilitated by electric arcing using a conducting niobium substrate. The shorteni...

Today, the electric/electronic (E/E) architecture of modern cars is a distributed network of embedded systems, consisting of several bus systems, dozens of electronic control units (ECUs) and hundreds of sensors and actuators. To this system, high requirements regarding determinism are imposed which form the basis for safe operation in any conceivable driving situation. Because of that, the tim...

Developing real robots that can exploit dynamic interactions with the environment requires the use of actuators whose behaviour can vary from high stiffness to complete compliance or zero impedance. We will outline our design for an electric actuator, called a programmable spring, which can be easily configured using a high level programming interface to emulate complex multimodal spring dampin...

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This paper presents a new type of contractile polymer-based electromechanical linear actuator. The device belongs to the class of dielectric elastomer actuators, which are typically capable of undergoing large deformations induced by an applied electric field. It is based on a novel helical configuration, suitable for the generation of electrically driven axial contractions and radial expansion...