The ultrasonic metal welding technique has been widely used because of the need to weld different materials for meeting high quality performance requirements. The key part in this type of welding is the horn, which plays an important role in the weld quality. Longitudinal vibration has so far been the most popular vibration mode for ultrasonic horns, but the longitudinal mode coupled with torsional mode is gaining a lot of attention these days owing to its better performance compared to the pure longitudinal mode. Although there are many studies on the performance of these two mode horns, comparative studies based on the performance of these two modes, particularly in ultrasonic metal welding, are very rare. This study focuses on the welding performance comparison of these two horns with 20 kHz resonant frequency. Experimental results show that the performance of the longitudinal-torsional horn is better than that of the longitudinal horn in terms of welding strength.

Ultrasonic cutting is used not only for cutting various materials such as metals and non-metals, but also for bone cutting of the human body or for various surgical operations. In recent, ultrasonic cutting technology is being applied for cutting various food products such as cakes, pizza, and cheese. It is shown that ultrasonic vibrations for cutting food products enables high-precision and high-quality cutting, and the quality of the cutting surface is affected by the shape of food products and cutting conditions. However, most of the studies have been on industrial cutting horns that can be used in large-scale grocery factories, but these cutting horns are very different from the shape of knives used in the households. Accordingly, research or technology development for ultrasonic cutting knives that can be used in household has not been studied. Therefore, this study developed a knife that can cut or process food by applying ultrasonic vibration while having a shape similar to the existing knife as possible so that it can be used in general. To develop such a knife, a modal analysis was performed using the finite element method for knife models of various shapes, and a suitable model for a kitchen knife was proposed.

In this paper, we design a gripping force control system using tactile sensor to prevent slip when gripper tries to grasp and lift an object. We use a flexible tactile sensor for measuring uniplanar pressure on gripper"s finger and develop an algorithm to detect the onset of slip using the sensor output. We also use a flexible pressure sensor to measure the normal force. In addition, various signal processing techniques are used to reduce noise included in the sensor output. A 3-finger gripper is used to grasp and lift up a cylindrical object. The tactile sensor is attached on one of fingers, and sends output signals to detect slip. Whenever the sensor signal is similar to the slip pattern, gripper force is increased. In conclusion, this research shows that slip can be detected using the tactile sensor and we can control gripping force to eliminate slip between gripper and object.