Mechanical assessment of soft biological tissues and organs has broad relevance in clinical diagnosis and treatment of disease. Existing characterization methods are invasive, lack microscale spatial resolution, and are tailored only for specific regions of the body under quasi-static conditions. Here, we develop conformal and piezoelectric devices that enable in vivo measurements of soft tissu...

This paper presents a piezoelectric tube scanner with a novel electrode pattern and describes how it may be used for simultaneous sensing and actuation. The electrodes are arranged such that the tube is driven in an antisymmetrical manner, resulting in a collocated system suitable for positive position feedback (PPF). A PPF controller is designed to damp the scanner's resonance. Piezoelectric s...

Design The feasibility study, focuses on building up knowledge of and experience with the technology of using the "d31-effect" of piezoelectric material to damp the internal vibrations of the system. The investigation starts by specifying the mathematical relations that describes the piezoelectric "d31-effect" and particularising these relations for the actuator and sensor situation. The two vi...

This paper describes the application of a novel actuator/sensor technology for the generation and detection of stress waves in structural materials like concrete. The technology is aimed at developing an innovative NDE scheme based on the generation of highly nonlinear solitary waves (HNSWs). HNSWs are stress waves that can form and travel in highly nonlinear systems (i.e. granular, layered, fi...

This paper deals with the design of a micro-eyein-hand architecture. It consists of a smart camera embedded on a gripper. The camera is a high speed (10 000 fps) CMOS sensor of 64 × 64 pixels. Each pixel measures 35 μm × 35 μm and includes a photodiode, an amplifier, two storage capacitors, and an analog arithmetic unit. The gripper consists of a 4 dof (degrees-of-freedom) (y+, y-, z+, z-) micr...

This paper presents a new approach for realizing a smart, fault tolerant, controllable and asset efficient power grid through the use of massively-dispersed mass-manufactured communicationsenabled sensor, power-converter and actuator networks. One example is ‘Smart Wires’, implemented using many modules of a Distributed Static Series Compensator (DSSC) device that can be clamped on to existing ...

Nowadays on the embedded systems market there is a remarkable shift from the industry field buses to the Ethernet and internet (TCP/IP) communication technologies. The work presented in this paper aims to introduce an approach to develop TCP/IP based smart sensor and actuator networks, which are scalable, both in physical size and in the number of sensors and actuators. This approach uses the S...

This paper deals with a new method to control flexible structures by designing noncollocated sensors and actuators satisfying a pseudo-collocation criterion in the low-frequency domain. This technique is applied to a simply supported plate with a point force actuator and a piezoelectric sensor, for which we give some theoretical and numerical results. We also compute low-order controllers which...

The paper considers the H ∞ control of collocated structural systems in vector second order form using an analytical bound approach. The model of a cantilevered beam with a collocated piezoelectric sensor/actuator pair is used to validate explicit analytical expressions that have been derived for the H ∞ norm bounds and the corresponding static output feedback control gains that achieve these b...