Effects of porosity on dynamic indentation resistance of silica nanofoam.

The dynamic indentation behaviors of monolithic silica nanofoams of various porosities are investigated. When the pore size is on the nm scale, as the porosity increases, despite the decrease in mass density, the resistance offered by silica nanofoam to dynamic indentation is maintained at a high level, higher than the resistance of solid silica or regular porous silica. This phenomenon is related to the fast collapse of nanocells, which produces a locally hardened region and significantly increases the volume of material involved in impact energy dissipation

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Geometric techniques for trajectory planning and chaos control of a bio-inspired autogenetic capsule robot

Biological systems achieve energy efficient and adaptive behaviours through extensive internal and external compliance interactions. Active dynamic compliance are created and enhanced from musculoskeletal system (joint-space) to external environment (task-space) amongst the underactuated motions. The terminology bio-inspiration implies the understanding of fundamental principles underlying the motion behaviours of animals and humans and transfers these principles into the development of robotic systems. For example, during walking, the muscles constantly change their stiffness and damping when the leg is swinging forward and the foot is put on the ground. This idea enables the exploration in robotic systems with flexible elements—viscoelasticity to mimic the compliant motion of biological muscles. Underactuated systems with viscoelastic actuation are similar to these biological systems, in that their self-organisation and overall tasks must be achieved by coordinating the subsystems and dynamically interacting with the environment

Modelling, dynamic analysis and control of capsubot systems with stable propulsion for medical and recovery assistances

The growth of medical robots since the mid-1980s has been striking. From a few initial efforts in stereotactic brain surgery, orthopaedics, endoscopic surgery, microsurgery, and other areas, the field has expanded to include commercially marketed, clinically deployed systems, and a robust and exponentially expanding research community. Obscure gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding, Crohn disease, Celiac disease, small bower tumors, and other disorders that occur in the GI tract have always been challenging to be diagnosed and treated due to the inevitable difficulty in accessing such a complex environment within the human body. Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery has become an choice

Modelling and control of an elastically joint-actuated cart-pole underactuated system

This paper investigates the modelling and closedloop tracking control issues of a novel elastic underactuated multibody system. A torsional inverted pendulum cart-pole system with a single rotary actuator at the pivot of the cart is proposed. The system dynamics which incorporates with motion planning is firstly described. An optimization procedure is then discussed to plan the feasible trajectories that not just meet the performance requirements but also obtain optimality with respect to the cart displacement and average velocity. A closed-loop tracking controller is designed under collocated partial feedback linearization (CPFL). Subsequent presentation of simulation demonstrates that the proposed system is promising as compared to the previous work. The paper concludes with the application of our novel scheme to the design and control of autonomous robot systems

On periodically pendulum-diven systems for underactuated locomotion: a viscoelastic jointed model

This paper investigates the locomotion principles and nonlinear dynamics of the periodically pendulum-driven (PD) systems using the case of a 2-DOF viscoelastic jointed model. As a mechanical system with underactuation degree one, the proposed system has strongly coupled nonlinearities and can be utilized as a potential benchmark for studying complicated PD systems. By mathematical modeling and non-dimensionalization of the physical system, an insight is obtained to the global system dynamics. The proposed 2-DOF viscoelastic jointed model establishes a commendable interconnection between the system dynamics and the periodically actuated force. Subsequently, the periodic locomotion principles of the actuated subsystem are elaborately studied and synthesized with the characteristic of viscoelastic element. Then the analysis of qualitative changes is conducted respectively under the varying excitation amplitude and frequency. Simulation results validate the efficiency and performance of the proposed system comparing with the conventional system

Constraining primordial black holes with relativistic degrees of freedom

Scalar perturbations in the early Universe create over-dense regions that can collapse into primordial black holes (PBH). This process emits scalar-induced gravitational waves (SIGW) that behaves like an extra radiation component and contributes to the relativistic degrees of freedom ($N_{\rm{eff}}$). We show that $N_{\rm{eff}}$ limits from cosmic microwave background (CMB) give promising sensitivities on both the abundance of PBHs and the primordial curvature perturbation ($\mathcal{P}_{\mathcal{R}}(k)$) at small scales. We show that {\it Planck} and ACTPol data can exclude supermassive PBHs with peak mass $M_{\bullet} \in [3 \times 10^{5}, 5 \times 10^{10}] {\rm{M}}_{\odot}$ as the major component of dark matter, depending on the shape of the PBHs mass distribution. Future CMB-S4 mission is capable of broadening this limit to a vast PBH mass window of $M_{\bullet} \in [8 \times 10^{-5}, 5 \times 10^{10}] {\rm{M}}_{\odot}$, covering sub-stellar masses. These limits correspond to the enhanced sensitivity of $\mathcal{P}_{\mathcal{R}}(k)$ on scales of $k \in [10^1, 10^{22}]\ \rm{Mpc^{-1}}$, which is much smaller than those scales probed by direct perturbation power spectra (CMB and large-scale structure).Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure