Actuators, Volume 5, Issue 2

Driven by increasing societal, economic, and technological pressures, high-resolution actuators must achieve ever increasing accuracy requirements and functional integration into the system.[...]

Industrial robots are most often position controlled and insensitive to external forces. In many robotic applications, however, such as teleoperation, haptics for virtual reality, and collaborative robotics, a close cooperation between humans and rob...

Recently various nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes and graphene, have been added to rubbery elastomers, such as poly dimethyl siloxane (PDMS), to enable generation of stress and displacement in response to remote illumination. While the respons...

Piezoelectric ultrasonic motors offer important advantages for motion applications where high speed is coupled with high precision. The advances made in the recent decades in the field of ultrasonic motor based motion solutions allow the construction...

This paper introduces recent advances on flapping-wing Micro and Nano Aerial Vehicles (MAVs and NAVs) based on Piezoelectric Actuators (PEA). Therefore, this work provides essential information to address the development of such bio-inspired aerial r...

Antiferroelectrics (AFE) can exhibit a “shape memory function controllable by electric field”, with huge isotropic volumetric expansion (0.26%) associated with the AFE to Ferroelectric (FE) phase transformation. Small inverse electric field applicati...

Piezoelectric tube actuators are extensively used in scanning probe microscopes to provide dynamic scanning motions in open-loop operations. Furthermore, they are employed as micropositioners due to their high bandwidth, high resolution and ease of e...

Piezoelectric transformers (PTs) are solid-state devices that transform electrical energy into electrical energy by means of a mechanical vibration. These devices are manufactured using piezoelectric materials that are driven at resonance. With appro...