Robotically Augmented Electric Guitar is a novel robotic guitar that establishes shared control between human performers and mechanical actuators. Unlike other mechatronic guitar instruments that perform pre-programmed music automatically, this guitar allows the human and actuators to produce sounds jointly; there exists a distributed control between the human and robotic components. The intera...

There is a strong push within the mining sector to automate equipment such as large excavators. A challenging problem is the control of motion on high inertia degrees of freedom where the actuators are constrained in the power they can deliver to and extract from the system and the machine’s underlying control system sits between the automation system and the actuators. The swing motion of an e...

Dielectric elastomers undergo large deformations in response to an electric field and consequently have attracted significant interest as electromechanical transducers. Applications of these materials include actuators capable of converting an applied electric field into mechanical motion and energy harvesting devices that convert mechanical energy into electrical energy. Numerically based desi...

 The eight-node solid-shell finite element models have been developed for the analysis of laminated composite pate/shell structures with piezoelectric actuators and sensors. To resolve the locking problems of the solid-shell elements in laminated materials and improve accuracy, the assumed natural strain method and hybrid stress method are employed. The nonlinear electric potential distributio...

Applying strong electric field on piezoelectric actuators, on one hand very significant electroelastic material nonlinear effects will occur, on the other hand piezo plates and shells may undergo large displacements and rotations. In order to give a precise prediction of piezolaminated smart structures under large electric field, this paper develops a finite element (FE) model accounting for bo...

The development of MEMS actuators is rapidly evolving and continuously new progress in terms of efficiency, power and force output is reported. Pneumatic and hydraulic are an interesting class of microactuators that are easily overlooked. Despite the 20 years of research, and hundreds of publications on this topic, these actuators are only popular in microfluidic systems. In other MEMS applicat...

More and more popular electric vehicles are excellent application platforms for steerby-wire (SBW) system. Handling stabilities and active safety are greatly improved when SBW is adopted in electric vehicle. The proposed new architecture of SBW electric vehicle is introduced, its dynamics model is built after the principle and structure. The algorithm achieves the yaw motion of electric vehicle...

Robotic devices are traditionally actuated by hydraulic systems or electric motors. However, with the desire to make robotic systems more compact and versatile, new actuator technologies are required. In this paper, the control of ionic polymer metal composite actuators is investigated from a practical perspective. The actuator characteristics are examined though the unblocked maximum displacem...