Related papers: Towards artificial muscles
Understanding and harnessing the coupling between lubrication pressure and elasticity provides materials design strategies for applications such as adhesives, coatings, microsensors, and biomaterials. Elastic deformation of compliant solids…
Soft slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems and can be observed at scales that range from the nanometric to the kilometric, from polymers to space tethers. We present a practical numerical approach to simulate…
As a consequence of elasticity, mechanical deformations of crystals occur on a length scale comparable to their thickness. This is exemplified by applying a homogeneous electric field to a multi-domain ferroelectric crystal: as one domain…
Piezoelectric actuators have been widely used to form a self-monitoring smart system to do Structural health monitoring (SHM). One of the most fundamental issues in using actuators is to determine the actuation effects being transferred…
Assistive ankle-foot orthoses (AAFOs) are powerful solutions to assist or rehabilitate gait on humans. Existing AAFO technologies include passive, quasi-passive, and active principles to provide assistance to the users, and their mechanical…
In this note, it is shown by counterexamples, theoretical analysis and simulation tests that the two types of sliding-mode controllers presented in the paper [1] fail to solve the stabilization problem of a class of under-actuated…
A flexible membrane deforming its shape in time can self-propel in a viscous fluid. Alternatively, if the membrane is anchored, its deformation will lead to fluid transport. Past work in this area focused on situations where the deformation…
Soft robots have immense potential given their inherent safety and adaptability, but challenges in soft actuator forces and design constraints have limited scaling up soft robots to larger sizes. Electrothermal shape memory alloy (SMA)…
This paper presents the design and assessment of a fabric-based soft pneumatic actuator with low pressurization requirements for actuation making it suitable for upper extremity assistive devices for infants. The goal is to support shoulder…
Electrostatic actuators are simple but important switching devices for MEMS applications. Due to the difficulties associated with the electrostatic nonlinearity, precise mathematical description is often hard to obtain for the dynamics of…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
Bodies coupled to electromagnetic or other long-range fields are subject to radiation reaction and other effects in which their own fields can influence their motion. Self-force phenomena such as these have been poorly understood for…
We present two concepts of deformable mirror to compensate for first order optical aberrations. Deformation systems are designed using both elasticity theory and Finite Element Analysis in order to minimize the number of actuators. Starting…
In simulations, particles are traditionally treated as rigid platforms with variable sizes, shapes and interaction parameters. While this representation is applicable for rigid core platforms, particles consisting of soft platforms (e.g.…
Modular Active Cell Robots (MACROs) are a design paradigm for modular robotic hardware that uses only two components, namely actuators and passive compliant joints. Under the MACRO approach, a large number of actuators and joints are…
In this paper we report, clarify and broaden various recent efforts to complement the chemistry-centered models of force generation in muscles by mechanics-centered models. The physical mechanisms of interest can be grouped into two…
Skeletal muscles are living tissues that can undergo large deformations in short periods of time and that can be activated to produce force. In this paper we use the principles of continuum mechanics to propose a dynamic, fully non-linear,…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
Soft robots have found extensive applications in the medical field, particularly in rehabilitation exercises, assisted grasping, and artificial organs. Despite significant advancements in simulating various components of the digestive…
The Cellular Automaton (CA) modeling and simulation of solid dynamics is a long-standing difficult problem. In this paper we present a new two-dimensional CA model for solid dynamics. In this model the solid body is represented by a set of…