Some insects or mammals use antennae or whiskers to detect by the sense of touch obstacles or recognize objects in environments in which other senses like vision cannot work. Artificial flexible antennae can be used in robotics to mimic this sense of touch in these recognition tasks. We have designed and built a two-degree of freedom (2DOF) flexible antenna sensor device to perform robot naviga...

The collision of a ball with a baseball bat or a tennis racket is usually modeled in terms of rigid body dynamics, assuming that the hand exerts no impulsive reaction force on the handle during the collision. In this paper, a uniform aluminum beam was used as an idealized bat or racket, in order to examine both the rigid body approximation and the assumption that the hand force can be neglected...

This study presents a generic TITOP (Two-Input Two-Output Port) model of a substructure actuated with embedded piezoelectric materials as actuators (PEAs), previously modeled with the FE technique. This allows intuitive assembly of actuated flexible substructures in large flexible multi-body systems. The modeling technique is applied to an illustrative example of a flexible beam with bonded pie...

This paper deals with the design of a periodic output feedback controller for a flexible beam structure modeled with Timoshenko beam theory, Finite Element Method, State space methods and embedded piezoelectrics concept. The first 3 modes are considered in modeling the beam. The main objective of this work is to control the vibrations of the beam when subjected to an external force. Shear piezo...

This paper features the modelling and design of a type of multirate output feedback based controller (Fast Output Sampling Feedback FOS) to control the flexural vibrations of a smart flexible Timoshenko cantilever beam for a Single Input Single Output (SISO) case by retaining the first 2 dominant vibratory modes. Piezoelectric patches are bonded as sensor / actuator to the master structure at d...

A methodology is presented for the modeling of flexible horizontal-axis, wind-turbine systems. The multi-rigid-body portions of the system are modeled as a system of interconnected rigid bodies using Autolev, a symbolic manipulator ideally suited for dynamics of multi-rigid-body systems. The flexible portions of the wind-turbine system are represented as beam finite elements. Equations are pres...

A flexible data acquisition platform has been developed for use in RHIC beam instrumentation systems. By incorporating a floating point digital signal processor (DSP) and standard input/output modules, this system can acquire and process data from a variety of beam diagnostic devices. The DSP performs real time corrections, filtering, and data buffering to greatly reduce control system computat...

By using particles, beam search and sequential Monte Carlo can approximate distributions in an extremely flexible manner. However, they can suffer from sparsity and inadequate coverage on large state spaces. We present a new filtering method for discrete spaces that addresses this issue by using “abstract particles,” each of which represents an entire region of state space. These abstract parti...

A flexible system described by Euler-Bernoulli beam equation is considered. The beam is clamped at one end, and is free at the other end. Boundary control force and torque inputs are applied at the free end of the beam. The transfer functions of the controllers are marginally stable and may contain some poles on the imaginary axis. Various stability results are shown and the application of the ...