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1. Embedded Magnetic Sensing for Feedback Control of Soft HASEL Actuators

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TRO.2022.3200164  

   Sundaram, Vani ; Ly, Khoi ; Johnson, Brian K. ; Naris, Mantas ; Anderson, Maxwell P. ; Humbert, James Sean ; Correll, Nikolaus ; Rentschler, Mark ( September 2022 , IEEE Transactions on Robotics)

   The need to create more viable soft sensors is increasing in tandem with the growing interest in soft robots. Several sensing methods, like capacitive stretch sensing and intrinsic capacitive self-sensing, have proven to be useful when controlling soft electro-hydraulic actuators, but are still problematic. This is due to challenges around high-voltage electronic interference or the inability to accurately sense the actuator at higher actuation frequencies. These issues are compounded when trying to sense and control the movement of a multiactuator system. To address these shortcomings, we describe a two-part magnetic sensing mechanism to measure the changes in displacement of an electro-hydraulic (HASEL) actuator. Our magnetic sensing mechanism can achieve high accuracy and precision for the HASEL actuator displacement range, and accurately tracks motion at actuation frequencies up to 30 Hz, while being robust to changes in ambient temperature and relative humidity. The high accuracy of the magnetic sensing mechanism is also further emphasized in the gripper demonstration. Using this sensing mechanism, we can detect submillimeter difference in the diameters of three tomatoes. Finally, we successfully perform closed-loop control of one folded HASEL actuator using the sensor, which is then scaled into a deformable tilting platform of six units (one HASELmore »actuator and one sensor) that control a desired end effector position in 3D space. This work demonstrates the first instance of sensing electro-hydraulic deformation using a magnetic sensing mechanism. The ability to more accurately and precisely sense and control HASEL actuators and similar soft actuators is necessary to improve the abilities of soft, robotic platforms.« less
2. Design and Assessment of Innovative Dual-Mode Rolling Isolation Systems

   https://doi.org/11244/321054  

   Hadikhan Tehrani, Mohammad ( August 2019 , The University of Oklahoma Libraries)

   Loss of operation or devastating damage to buildings and industrial structures, as well as equipment housed in them, has been observed due to earthquake-induced vibrations. A common source of operational downtime is due to the performance reduction of vital equipment, which are sensitive to the total transmitted acceleration. A well-known method of protecting such equipment is seismic isolation of the equipment itself (or a group of equipment), as opposed to the entire structure due to the lower cost of implementation. The first objective of this dissertation is assessing a rolling isolation system (RIS) based on existing design guidelines for telecommunications equipment. A discrepancy is observed between the required response spectrum (RRS) and the one and only accelerogram recommended in the guideline. Several filters are developed to generate synthetic accelerograms that are compatible with the RRS. The generated accelerograms are used for probabilistic assessment of a RIS that is acceptable per the guideline. This assessment reveals large failure probability due to displacement demands in excess of the displacement capacity of the RIS. When the displacement demands on an isolation system are in excess of its capacity, impacts result in spikes in transmitted acceleration. Therefore, the second objective of this dissertation ismore »to design impact prevention/mitigation mechanisms. A dual-mode system is proposed where the behavior changes when the displacement exceeds a predefined threshold. A new piecewise optimal control approach is developed and applied to find the best possible mechanism for the region beyond the threshold. By utilizing the designed curves obtained from the proposed optimal control procedure, a Kelvin-Voigt device is tuned for illustrative purposes. On the other hand, the preference for protecting equipment decreases as the earthquake intensity increases. In extreme seismic loading, the response mitigation of the primary structure (i.e., life safety and collapse prevention) is of greater concern than protecting isolated equipment. Therefore, the third objective of this dissertation is to develop an innovative dual-mode system that can behave as equipment isolation under low to moderate seismic loading and passively transition to behave as a vibration absorber for the primary structure under extreme seismic loading. To reduce the computational cost of simulating a large linear elastic structure with nonlinear attachments (i.e., equipment isolation with cubic hardening nonlinearity), a reduced order modeling method is introduced that can capture the behavior of such nonlinear coupled systems. The method is applied to study the feasibility of dual-mode vibration isolation/absorber. To this end, nonlinear transmissibility curves for the roof displacement and isolated mass total acceleration are developed from the steady-state responses of dual-mode systems using the harmonic balanced method. The final objective of this dissertation is to extend the reduced order modeling method developed for linear elastic structure with nonlinear attachment to inelastic structures (without attachments). The new inelastic model condensation (IMC) method uses the modal properties of the full structural model (in the elastic range) to construct a linear reduced order model in conjunction with a hysteresis model to capture the hysteretic inter-story restoring forces. The parameters of these hysteretic forces are easily tuned, in order to fit the inelastic behavior of the condensed structure to that of the full model under a variety of simple loading scenarios. The fidelity of structural models condensed in this way is demonstrated via simulation for different ground motion intensities on three different building structures with various heights. The simplicity, accuracy, and efficiency of this approach could significantly alleviate the computational burden of performance-based earthquake engineering.« less
3. Optimal fractional-order proportional–integral–derivative control enabling full actuation of decomposed rotary inverted pendulum system

   https://doi.org/10.1177/01423312221146606  

   Yang, Yi ; Zhang, Haiyan H. ; Voyles, Richard M. ( January 2023 , Transactions of the Institute of Measurement and Control)

   Allowing for a “virtual” full actuation of a rotary inverted pendulum (RIP) system with only a single physical actuator has been a challenging problem. In this paper, a hybrid control scheme that involves a pole-placement feedback controller and an optimal proportional–integral–derivative (PID) or fractional-order PID (FOPID) controller is proposed to simultaneously enable the tracking control of the rotary arm and the stabilization of the pendulum arm in an input–output feedback linearized RIP system. The PID controller is optimized first with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) to obtain three optimal gains, and then the other two parameters of the FOPID controller are optimized with the PSO. Compared to the optimized PID controller, the optimized FOPID controller improves the tracking and stabilizing accuracy by 53% and 29%, respectively, and demonstrates better adaptability for tracking different reference signals. Moreover, the hybrid FOPID controller exhibits 74.8% and 53% higher tracking accuracy than previous optimized model reference adaptive control PID (MRAC-PID) and linear–quadratic regulator (LQR) controllers, respectively. The proposed hybrid controllers are also digitized with different rules and sampling times, showing a closer performance between the discrete-time and continuous-time hybrid controllers under smaller sampling times.
4. Robust Control of a Biophysical Model of Burst Suppression

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4054387  

   Ampleman, Stephen ; Ching, ShiNung ( July 2022 , ASME Letters in Dynamic Systems and Control)

   Abstract Burst suppression is a phenomenon in which the electroencephalogram (EEG) of a pharmacologically sedated patient alternates between higher frequency and amplitude bursting to lower frequency and amplitude suppression. The level of sedation can be quantified by the burst suppression ratio (BSR), which is defined as the amount of time that an EEG is suppressed over the amount of time measured. Maintaining a stable BSR in patients is an important clinical problem, which has led to an interest in the development of BSR-based closed-loop pharmacological control systems. Methods to address the problem typically involve pharmacokinetic (PK) modeling that describes the dynamics of drug infusion in the body as well as signal processing methods for estimating burst suppression from EEG measurements. In this regard, simulations, physiological modeling, and control design can play a key role in producing a solution. This paper seeks to add to prior work by incorporating a Schnider PK model with the Wilson–Cowan neural mass model to use as a basis for robust control design of biophysical burst suppression dynamics. We add to this framework actuator modeling, real-time burst suppression estimation, and uncertainty modeling in both the patient's physical characteristics and neurological phenomena to form a closed-loop system.more »Using the Ziegler–Nichols tuning method for proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control, we were able to control this system at multiple BSR set points over a simulation time of 18 h in both nominal, patient varied with noise added and with reduced performance due to BSR bounding when including patient variation and noise as well as neurological uncertainty.« less
5. Chance Constraint based design of Input Shapers

   Nandi, Souransu ; Singh, Tarunraj ( August 2017 , 2017 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications)

   The focus of this paper is on the design of input shapers for systems with uncertainties in the parameters of the vibratory modes which need to be attenuated. A probabilistic framework is proposed for the design of the robust input shaper, when the uncertain modal parameters are characterized by probability density functions. A convex chance constrained optimization problem is posed to determine the parameters of input shapers (time-delay filter) which can accommodate the users acceptable risk levels for a prescribed residual energy threshold. Robust input shapers are developed for various compact support distributions to illustrate the ability of the proposed formulation to synthesize input shapers which can satisfy a residual energy threshold with a given risk level. This problem formulation can conceivably reduce the conservative nature of worst case controllers which have to ensure that all realizations of the uncertain system have to satisfy a prescribed performance index. The chance constrained input shaper is designed for a spring-mass-dashpot system with three different distributions for the uncertain spring stiffness. Results provide encouragement for the extension of the proposed approach to multi-dimensional and multi-model uncertainties.