Recently the interest in miniaturization of mechanical devices has increased and magneto-rheological (MR) fluid brakes have been designed, fabricated and tested to be applied as a control element of various devices for assisting the elderly people. A multi-disk modular type of design is proposed to make an MR fluid brake that can generate high torque at the minimum size. The design parameters of the MR fluid brake were determined by mathematical modeling and the performance was predicted with magnetic analysis to maximize the design torque. A testbed was constructed and torque responses were measured and analyzed according to the input current for various rotational speeds to confirm the performance of the MR fluid brake. The experimental results showed that the MR fluid brake was applicable to actuating devices for assisting elderly people.

Tip position control of a flexible cantilever is difficult due to the non-minimum phase dynamics that result from the finite propagating speed of a mechanical wave along the cantilever. In this paper, we propose a method for the tip position control using a light and cheap accelerometer that does not bring any significant change to the dynamics of the cantilever system. The linear system identification model of the flexible cantilever is obtained with measurements by a laser displacement sensor. A Kalman estimator is designed with this model and calculates the estimated tip position with the acceleration data of the accelerometer that is attached on the tip of the cantilever. To verify reliability of the estimator, the estimated tip position is used to the feedback control system that uses a fuzzy logic controller. The control results are compared with those of the fuzzy control system where the real tip position is measured by a laser displacement sensor. Also, the performance of the estimator with the accelerometer is presented and discussed.

Previous researches show that linearly integrated Hall sensor arrays (LIHaS) can detect cracks in the steel structure fast and effectively. This paper proposes an algorithm that estimates the size and shape of cracks for the developed LIHaS. In most nondestructive testing (NDT), just crack existence and location are obtained by processing 1-dimensional data from the sensor that scans the object with relative speed in single direction. The proposed method is composed with two steps. The first step is constructing 2-dimensionally mapped data space by combining the converted position data from the time-based scan data with the position information of sensor arrays those are placed in the vertical direction to the scan direction. The second step is applying designed Laplacian filter and smoothing filter to estimate the size and shape of cracks. The experimental results of express train wheels show that the proposed algorithm is not only more reliable and accurate to detecting cracks but also effective to estimate the size and shape of cracks.

This paper describes a path planning algorithm, which is the minimal turning path based on the shape and size of the cell to clean up the whole area with two cleaning robots. Our method divides the whole cleaning area with each cell by cellular decomposition, and then provides some path plans among of the robots to reduce the rate of energy consumption and cleaning time of it. In addition we suggest how to plan between the robots especially when they are cleaning in the same cell. Finally simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm in an unknown area with multiple robots. And then we compare the performance index of two algorithms such as total of turn, total of time.

This study proposes a technique to estimate the material property of a paper by using an experimental methods and commercial CAE software. Under gravitation, if one side of the paper is attached to the ground, the opposite side of paper is largely deformed, and vibrates freely. Since the paper has an orthotropic characteristic due to its treatment, the deformations in two orthogonal directions of the dry paper are different. An experimental method to measure the static deformation of the paper introduces this phenomenon. And dynamic behavior, frequency of free vibration is measured. And then, virtual prototypes that can represent the static and dynamic behavior are modeled by using the commercial CAE software RecurDyn ™/MTT3D, which has been widely used by the printer makers. While comparing the deformation and frequency from the experiment and simulation, a design optimization technique in the commercial CAE software of R-INOPL, RecurDyn ™/AutoDesign is used to estimate the material property such as Young's modulus, shear modulus and density of the paper.