Multiferroic magnetoelectric (ME) composites are attractive materials for various electrically and magnetically cross-coupled devices. Many studies have been conducted on fundamental understanding, fabrication processes, and applications of ME compos...
This paper focuses on the recent development of soft pneumatic actuators for soft robotics over the past few years, concentrating on the following four categories: control systems, material and construction, modeling, and sensors. This review work se...
Due to issues with Pb toxicity, there is an urgent need for high performance Pb-free alternatives to Pb-based piezoelectric ceramics. Although pure BaTiO3 material exhibits fairly low piezoelectric coefficients, further designing of such a material s...
Energy harvesting is the most effective way to respond to the energy shortage and to produce sustainable power sources from the surrounding environment. The energy harvesting technology enables scavenging electrical energy from wasted energy sources,...
In this systematic survey, an overview of non-conventional actuators particularly used in soft-robotics is presented. The review is performed by using well-defined performance criteria with a direction to identify the exemplary and potential applicat...
Shape memory polymers (SMPs) are smart materials capable of changing their shapes in a predefined manner under a proper applied stimulus and have gained considerable interest in several application fields. Particularly, two-way and multiple-way SMPs...
In the medical field and in soft robotics, flexible devices are required for safe human interaction, while rigid structures are required to withstand the force application and accuracy in motion. This paper aims at presenting controllable stiffness m...
Jamming is a popular and versatile soft robotic mechanism, enabling new systems to be developed that can achieve high stiffness variation with minimal volume variation. Numerous applications have been reported, including deep-sea sampling, industrial...
In the field of robotics, soft robots have been showing great potential in the areas of medical care, education, service, rescue, exploration, detection, and wearable devices due to their inherently high flexibility, good compliance, excellent adapta...
Piezoelectric inertia motors—also known as stick-slip motors or (smooth) impact drives—use the inertia of a body to drive it in small steps by means of an uninterrupted friction contact. In addition to the typical advantages of piezoelectric motors,...
This paper presents a review of electrothermal micro-actuators and applications. Electrothermal micro-actuators have been a significant research interest over the last two decades, and many different designs and applications have been investigated. T...
Pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) are soft and flexible linear pneumatic actuators which produce human muscle like actuation. Due to these properties, the muscle actuators have an adaptable compliance for various robotic platforms as well as medica...
Piezoelectric motors are used in many industrial and commercial applications. Various piezoelectric motors are available in the market. All of the piezoelectric motors use the inverse piezoelectric effect, where microscopically small oscillatory moti...
With the breadth of applications and analysis performed over the last few decades, it would not be an exaggeration to call piezoelectric materials “the top of the crop” of smart materials. Piezoelectric materials have emerged as the most researched m...
In this paper, the related studies of chassis configurations and control systems for four-wheel independent drive/steering electric vehicles (4WID-4WIS EV) are reviewed and discussed. Firstly, some prototypes and integrated X-by-wire modules of 4WID-...
Point machines are the actuators for railway switching and crossing systems that guide trains from one track to another. Hence, the safe and reliable behavior of point machines are pivotal for rail transportation. Recently, scholars and researchers h...
Magnetostrictive actuators play an important role in the perception of usefulness of smart materials and devices. Their applications are potentially wider than that of piezoelectric actuators because of the higher energy density and intrinsic robustn...
Micromanipulation is a hot topic due to its enabling role in various research fields. In order to perform a high precision operation at a small scale, compliant mechanisms have been proposed and applied for decades. In microscale manipulation, micro-...
In this article, various investigations on soft exoskeletons are presented and their functional and structural characteristics are analyzed. The present work is oriented to the studies of the last decade and covers the upper and lower joints, specifi...
Mechanical vibrational energy, which is provided by continuous or discontinuous motion, is an infinite source of energy that may be found anywhere. This source may be utilized to generate electricity to replenish batteries or directly power electrica...
Pneumatic artificial muscles are pneumatic devices with practical and various applications as common actuators. They, as human muscles, work in agonistic-antagonistic way, giving a traction force only when supplied by compressed air. The state of the...
Multiferroic magnetoelectric (ME) materials with the capability of coupling magnetization and electric polarization have been providing diverse routes towards functional devices and thus attracting ever-increasing attention. The typical device applic...
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...
Soft robotics requires technologies that are capable of generating forces even though the bodies are composed of very light, flexible and soft elements. A soft actuation mechanism was developed in this work, taking inspiration from the arm of the Oct...
This paper reviews and summarizes the development, key technologies, and application of brake-by-wire (BBW) actuators. BBW is the technology orientation of future vehicle brake system. The main feature of BBW is to replace some of the mechanical and...
Aiming at the problems of control stability of the intelligent vehicle lateral control method, single test conditions, etc., a lateral control method with feedforward + predictive LQR is proposed, which can better adapt to the problem of intelligent...
Over the past decade, 3D printing technology has been leading the manufacturing revolution. A recent development in the field of 3D printing has added time as a fourth dimension to obtain 4D printing parts. A fabricated design created by 3D printing...
Traditional rigid robot application in the medical field is limited due to the limited degrees of freedom caused by their material and structure. Inspired by trunk, tentacles, and snakes, continuum robot (CR) could traverse confined space, manipulate...
The Series Elastic Actuator (SEA) has recently been developed by many research groups and applied in various fields. As SEA is the combination of motor, spring, gear and load, various types and configurations of mechanism have been developed as SEAs...
Ionic electromechanically active polymers (IEAP) are laminar composites that can be considered attractive candidates for soft actuators. Their outstanding properties such as low operating voltage, easy miniaturization, and noiseless operation are, ho...
Magnetorheological (MR) fluids are capable of manifesting a rheological behaviour change by means of a magnetic field application and can be employed in many complex systems in many technical fields. One successful example is their use in the develop...
This study presents a control design of an angular position for the exoskeleton knee assistance system based on a model reference adaptive control (MRAC) strategy. Three schemes of the MRAC design have been proposed: the classical MRAC, MRAC with an...
Piezoelectrics have been widely used in different kinds of applications, from the automobile industry to consumer electronics. The novel multilayer piezoelectrics, which are inspired by multilayer ceramic capacitors, not only minimize the size of the...
An optimal mission assignment and path planning method of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for disaster rescue is proposed. In this application, the UAVs include the drug delivery UAV, image collection UAV, and communication relay UAV. When i...
The plasma synthetic jet actuator (PSJA), also named as sparkjet actuator, is a special type of zero-net mass flux actuator, driven thermodynamically by pulsed arc/spark discharge. Compared to widely investigated mechanical synthetic jet actuators dr...
To improve the path tracking accuracy of autonomous tractors in operation, an improved Stanley controller (IMP-ST) is proposed in this paper. The controller was applied to a two-wheel tractor dynamics model. The parameters of the IMP-ST were optimize...
A monoarticular series elastic actuator (SEA) reduces energetic and peak power requirements compared to a direct drive (DD) in active prosthetic ankle-foot design. Simulation studies have shown that similar advantages are possible for the knee joint....
Compliant continuum robots (CCRs) have slender and elastic bodies. Compared with a traditional serial robot, they have more degrees of freedom and can deform their flexible bodies to go through a constrained environment. In this paper, we classify CC...
This study proposes using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to carry out tasks involving path planning and obstacle avoidance, and to explore how to improve work efficiency and ensure the flight safety of drones. One of the applications under considera...
Soft grippers are known for their ability to interact with objects that are fragile, soft or of an unknown shape, as well as humans in collaborative robotics applications. However, state-of-the-art soft grippers lack either payload capacity or durabi...
In the last decade, an enormous amount of attention has been paid to piezoelectric harvesters due to their flexibility in design and the increasing need for small-scale energy generation. As a result, various energy review papers have been presented...
Compared with traditional rigid robots, soft robots have high flexibility, low stiffness, and adaptability to unstructured environments, and as such have great application potential in scenarios such as fragile object grasping and human machine inter...
Origami structures are highly demanded for engineering applications. Using origami folding to design and actuate mechanisms and machines offers attractive opportunities. In this paper, we design a crawling robot driven by pneumatic foldable actuators...
Piezoelectric ceramic actuators have the advantages of fast response speed and high positioning accuracy and are widely used in micro-machinery, aerospace, precision machining machinery, and other precision positioning fields. However, hysteretic non...
Four-dimensional textiles are textiles that can change shape or function over time by the influence of a stimulus, mainly force and heat. In this review, the focus is on 4D textiles made by additive manufacturing which is built on the concept of 4D p...
Position control of servo motor systems is a challenging task because of inevitable factors such as uncertainties, nonlinearities, parametric variations, and external perturbations. In this article, to alleviate the above issues, a practical adaptive...
This paper presents a case study and a model to predict maintenance interventions based on condition monitoring of diesel engine oil in urban buses by accompanying the evolution of its degradation. Many times, under normal functioning conditions, the...
In this study, synergetic-based adaptive control design is developed for trajectory tracking control of joint position in knee-rehabilitation system. This system is often utilized for rehabilitation of patients with lower-limb disabilities. However,...
This systematic review explores recent advancements in control methods for rehabilitation exoskeleton robots, which assist individuals with motor impairments through guided movement. As robotics technology progresses, precise, adaptable, and safe con...
Force-controlled series elastic actuators (SEA) are widely used in novel human-robot interaction (HRI) applications, such as assistive and rehabilitation robotics. These systems are characterized by the presence of the “human in the loop”, so that co...
