This paper presents an optimization-based method to aid capacity planning decisions by quantifying the trade-off between the capital and operating costs of a production facility and the quality of finished products. Given forecasted market demands during multiple production periods, multi-objective optimization selects the quantity and the types of production machines to be purchased during eac...

In this study, we present a biological micro-electromechanical system and its application to the chondrogenic differentiation of rabbit bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Actuated by an electromagnetic force, the micro cell exciter was designed to deliver a cyclic compressive load (CCL) with various magnitudes. Two major parts in the system are an actuator and a cartridge-type c...

Electromagnetic-actuated robotic systems have been studied recently for special purposes. Because these systems use external magnetic fields to control their robots, the robots can have simple structures and move with much freedom. In particular, these electromagnetic actuation (EMA) systems are being widely adopted for the actuation of biomedical mini-robots and microrobots for minimally invas...

In this work, the concept of a convolution product of real-valued functions on the Special Euclidean group, SE(D) (which describes all rigid body motions in D-dimensional Euclidean space), is applied to the determination of workspaces of discretely actuated manipulators. These manipulators have a finite number of joint states. If a discretely actuated manipulator consists of P actuated modules,...

In this paper we study the dynamics and kinematics of manipulators that have fewer actuators than degrees of freedom. These under{actuated manipulators arise in a number of important applications such as free{ ying space robots, hyper{redundant manipulators, manipulators with structural exibility, etc. In our analysis we decompose such under{actuated manipulators into component active and passi...

Virtual Prototyping with haptic feedback offers great benefits in the development process of actuated systems. We present a generic control scheme for the haptic rendering of actuated mechanisms, introducing the active admittance. It extends the conventional admittance control by modeling the actuation and the movable parts of the mechanism separately. This allows for an efficient iterative des...

Powder-actuated (also referred to as low velocity or powder-driven) fasteners are commonly used to attach cold-formed steel framing members, usually a track, to a concrete or structural steel support. Although commonly used, their behavior is less well understood than other fasteners such as screws, bolts and welds. The AISI Cold-Formed Steel Design Manual does not explicitly address powder act...

Piezo-electric material can be controlled with current as the electrical variable, instead of voltage. The main purpose of this paper is to derive the governing equations for a currentcontrolled piezo-electric beam and to investigate stabilizability. Besides the consideration of current control, there are several new aspects to the model here. Most significantly, magnetic effects are included. ...