Actuators  

Pengchuan Wang and Andrew T. Conn

Unlike conventional rigid actuators, soft robotic technologies possess inherent compliance, so they can stretch and twist along every axis without the need for articulated joints. This compliance is exploited here using dielectric elastomer membranes to d... see more

Nicholas Paine and Luis Sentis

This paper presents an in-depth system-level experimental analysis comparing air-cooled and liquid-cooled commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) electric motors. Typically, liquid-cooled electric motors are reserved for large, expensive, high-end applications wh... see more

Mikio Muraoka, Xu Zhao and Shun Liu

This paper proposes a new ultracompact planar positioner driven by unbalanced frictional forces. The prototype of the designed positioner is 17 mm × 17 mm × 9 mm in size, and is simply constructed using lead zirconate titanate piezoelectric elements, neod... see more

Thomas Sinn and Ron Barrett

The use of morphing components on aerospace structures can greatly increase the versatility of an aircraft. This paper presents the design, manufacturing and testing of a new kind of adaptive airfoil with actuation through Shape Memory Alloys (SMA). The d... see more

Quang-Anh Nguyen, Steven Jens Jorgensen, Joseph Ho and Luis Sentis

Previous studies of electrorheological fluids (ERFs) were motivated by brake, clutch, damping, haptic and resistive applications, but never motivated towards developing an ERF based-hydraulic rotary actuator. One design to make such an actuator is to use ... see more