IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics

Hybridizing automotive drivetrains, or using more than one type of energy converter, is considered an important step toward very low pollutant emission and high fuel economy. The automotive industry and governments in the United States, Europe, and Japan have formed strategic initiatives with the aim of cooperating in the development of new vehicle technologies. Efforts to meet fuel economy and ex... View full abstract»

The increasing demands for low emissions and low fuel consumption in modern combustion engines require improved methods for online diagnosis and best possible control of the combustion process. It is demonstrated that the cylinder pressure signal can successfully be used for this task. After introduction of some theoretical background, several application examples are presented: an online supervis... View full abstract»

A great many control schemes for a robot manipulator interacting with the environment have been developed in the literature. This paper is aimed at presenting a survey of robot interaction control schemes for a manipulator, the end effector of which comes in contact with a compliant surface. A salient feature of the work is the implementation of the schemes on an industrial robot with open control... View full abstract»

Addresses realistic subjects encountered in the challenge of achieving technology improvement in a vehicle stability control system. They include driver intent recognition, vehicle status measurement and estimation, control target generation, system actuation efficiency and smoothness, road bank angle detection, system development and evaluation, and fault detection View full abstract»

Describes the performance evaluation of a limited-angle torque motor, using a simple piecewise analytical approach to overcome system nonlinearities. A block-diagram model developed from a combination of measurement and manufacturer's data is shown to be capable of accurately predicting both the steady-state and the dynamic performance. The approach described is of valuable assistance in the desig... View full abstract»

Examines the control of an industrial injection molding machine (IMM) for both mold filling and mold packing. The machine is a Boy 50 Ton system operated by hydraulics with electronically controlled valves. A nonlinear model of the system is determined for the filling and packing stages, then verified against experimental data. The model includes several key aspects of the actual machine dynamics ... View full abstract»

Automated steering control is a crucial element of vehicle automation. The California PATH Program at the University of California at Berkeley has developed one such system using magnetic markers embedded under the roadway for lateral guidance. This system was demonstrated during the August 1997 National Automated Highway System Consortium Feasibility Demonstration, San Diego, CA, without a single... View full abstract»

A micro inspection robot for 1-in pipes has been developed. The robot is 23 mm in diameter and 110 mm in length and is equipped with a high-quality micro charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and a dual hand for manipulating small objects in pipes. It can travel through both vertical pipes and curved sections, making possible inspections that would be difficult with conventional endoscopes. Its rate ... View full abstract»

Solenoid-controlled pilot-operated servovalves are flow control devices widely used to drive high-flow hydraulic actuators in heavy-duty off-highway machinery. In these applications, a spool-operated pilot stage is required to account for large flow force in the main hydraulic valve. Design optimization, performance improvement, and fault diagnosis of such complex two-stage servovalves often requi... View full abstract»

Presents a structural design for force/torque fingertip sensors to sense planar forces. Not only can the resolution be increased by reducing the condition number of the calibration matrix, but also the accuracy can be enhanced by a precise and simple calibration method. Moreover, the theoretical analysis and design procedure of the proposed structure are included in this paper, and experimental re... View full abstract»

Ultrasonic inspection of tires has previously been performed using low frequencies in air, which results in low spatial resolution. In addition, the tire has not typically been completely inspected. The limited scanning area and scanning resolution in previous work has been the result of difficulties in acquiring and handling large data sets, difficulties in positioning transducers in a large numb... View full abstract»