6 accepted papers
Vibrational piezoelectric energy harvesters (vPEH) are of great interest in several fields such as autonomous sensors and wireless sensor networks, bird tracking devices, or autonomous miniaturized robotic systems. They capture energy from mechanical vibrations available in the ambient environment a…
Current digital microrobots are mainly composed of bistable modules and flexible structures. Unlike conventional microrobots, they are based on mechanical stability instead of complex control strategies in order to reach precise and repeatable discrete positioning. By design, their number of stable
Piezoelectric materials based actuators are highly recognized for the development of microrobotic systems thanks to their high bandwidth, high resolution and high force density. However, one of their main drawback is the low relative stroke (0.1% of actuator's size) that limits the actuator motion r
Micro-teleoperated interaction with biological cells is of special interest. The low fidelity of previous systems aimed at such small scale tasks prompted the design of a novel manual bilateral cell injection system. This systems employed the coupling of a null-displacement active force sensor with
In this letter, piezoelectric plate energy harvesters are designed by using topology optimization algorithm to harvest the excitation from different directions. The goal is to minimize the volume and weight of the whole structure so the harvesters can be used in small scale applications. To this aim
Due to their inherent crystalline properties piezoelectric actuators have a limited deformation. This intrinsic drawback deprives to exploit the potential of these actuators such as, high bandwidth and high resolution in applications that require large displacement range. To overcome this limitation…