Sharif Digital Repository

In this thesis, the dynamic analysis of the scratch drive micromotor will be investigated. Scratch drive micromotor consists of a rotational arrangement of the scratch drive actuators (SDAs). SDAs that are actuated by using electrostatic force are used in a wide range of applications in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) due to their unique advantages such as large output force, long travel distance and high-precision step size. However implementing a physical model to describe the movement of the SDA is chalanging and little researches have been performed to model and analyse the SDAs, in porpuse of predicting the behavior of the SDA before final design and manufacturing. By reviewing... 

Grasping and manipulation of biological cells have an extensive applications in genetics ,cell proliferation ,cell injection and etc. In robotic manipulation ,it is often assumed that the objects being handled are rigid and only small deformations occurred during manipulation. this does not apply for the case of biological cells. biological cells are highly deformable structures, and their material properties are not well quantified. Therefore strategies for characterizing and manipulating of such deformable objects needs to develop. Different experimental techniques have recently been used and devised to study biological cells. On the one hand, although this experimental techniques have... 

At the moment, one of the most important challenges that human beings are struggling with is the dominance of micro and nano dimensions. Considering the potential of microorganisms, and in particular magnetic microscopes, it is believed that using this technology, humans would be able to meet most of their needs. Studies have shown that it is possible to control the position of a magnetic microrobots, through the production of magnetic fields, with sufficient accuracy. Since magnetic fields are biocompatible, magnetic microrobots can also be used in biotechnology and medical applications.In this dissertation, a positioning device was designed and constructed with the ability to position the... 

Microrobots design and manufacturing has been one of interesting fields in robotics in recent decades. They have been designed in various types so far. In this paper a two-leg microrobot is simulated and controlled by using LuGre friction model.
The proposed microrobot is driven by a piezoelectric actuator mounted between centers of two legs. The piezoelectric is actuated by a frequency near the natural frequency of the robot. The nonlinear dynamical equations of the system are obtained considering LuGre friction model. To control the system, the equations of motion are linearized using feedback linearization method. Then a stabilizing control law is designed and the robot model is... 

The so-called “Fast Downward” is a successful heuristic planner. This planner extracts informative data structures during planning. A number of efforts have been made to detect some constraints for guiding search toward the goal, in the hope to speed up the planning process. These constraints usually result in a number of sub-goals and determining their proper ordering. These sub-goals are called landmarks, which must be true at some point in every valid solution plan. Landmarks can be used to decompose a given planning task into several smaller sub-tasks. In this dissertation a new method is proposed to extracts landmark and recognizes their ordering based on fast downward basic data... 

The recent researches show that Value at Risk estimations are biased and is calculated conservatively. Bao and Olah (2004) proved that the bias of an ARCH(1) model for VaR can be formulated in to two parts: bias due to return Misspecification ( ) and bias due to estimation error ( ). Using a GARCH(1,1) and quasi maximum likelihood estimation method, this research intends to find an analytical framework for the two source of biases. We generate returns from Normal and t-student distributions, then estimate the GARCH(1,1) under Normal and t-student assumptions. Our findings reveal that equals to zero for the Normal likelihood function, but . Also, and are not zero for the t-student... 

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is important because of wide applications such as self cleaning surfaces and using in photoelectrochemical cells .Recent researches have shown that addition of silicon dioxide into TiO2 increases hydrophilicity of SiO2-TiO2 and improves surface properties. Until now a little research has been done on the double layer TiO2/SiO2 system; therefore, this system is suitable for studying. In general this thesis consists of theoretical and experimental parts .In the experimental part, multilayer systems of SiO2/TiO2/Glass have been selected (thickness of SiO2 is 20 nm) and surface morphology and hydrophilicity have been investigated by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and... 

In this paper, the general research of impedance control is addressed for a robotic manipulator with a moving flexible base. Impedance control imposes a relation between force and displacement at the contact point with the environment. The concept of impedance control of flexible base moving manipulators (FBMM) is rather new and is being considered. The dynamic of manipulator is decomposed into slow and fast dynamics using singular perturbation method. New sliding mode impedance control method (SMIC), using an element on the end effector is proposed for high precision impedance control of FBMM. The sliding mode impedance control method as a robust impedance control law is derived for the... 

The main objective of this project is to investigate modeling for a robotic swarm with suitable sensors and to analyze effect of sensory noise on the control and unity of the swarm. This project is an extension of analytical study done by S. Etemadi, A. Alasty and G. Vossoughi in Sharif University of technology. The flocking frame assumed to have a leader robot that controls over all behavior of the swarm made of agents’ robots with limited equipments and low intelligence that only obey some basic attraction and repulsion laws that will be explained. As an initial step of the analysis, we investigate proper physical model, sensors and navigation systems suitable to the model. Next, the... 

Modeling and Control are fundamental issues for fish robots, which can play basic roles in design, optimization, fabrication, and eventually utilization of them. A review on the literature reveals the shortage of an analytical closed form model with little simplifications and high precision, and also control works based on such models. Studying LAEBT theory, it is shown that this theory is suitable for determining the forces produced due to the tail movements considered in the present work, and then it is used to determine the forces. Experimental investigations by means of the setup made for this purpose showed that the obtained equations for the forces have got acceptable precision.... 

Temperature noise phenomenon in nuclear reactors results to the vital information about the system. This phenomenon may originate from coolant inlet temperature fluctuations, coolant fluid velocity fluctuations or the reactor power fluctuations in PWR reactors. Diagnosis of such temperature noise sources shall improve the reactor control and protection.The present research aims to develop a software to model the temperature noise in the axial direction of a single channel comprises of fuel rod and the associated coolant to recognize the type of temperature noise sources. In this regard, research stages are as follows: first the temperature noise caused by three conventional noise sources in... 

The Very-High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) design is one of the six candidates for the Generation IV nuclear reactors. The reactor core type of the VHTR design is either prismatic or pebble-bed. In pebble bed reactors, the core is filled of thousands of graphite and fuel pebbles. Fuel pebbles in these reactors consist of TRISO particles, which are embedded in a graphite matrix stochastically. The reactor core is also stochastically filled up of fuel and dummy pebbles with an unequal ratio. These two stochastic geometries are the so-called double heterogeneous of this type of reactors. In the current study, a... 

This research focuses on the robust mobile robot localization exploiting motion information acquired from an optical mouse operating based on optical flow technology. Most techniques of visual motion measurement are based on the well research discipline called “optical flow”. Theoretically, optical flow as a method of localization can be highly accurate, but it is sensitive to the noise and surface texture/optical characteristics and distance variations between the CCD detector and surface. As one could not achieve acceptable results in practical situations, to handle these problems, we propose to attach an acceleration – gyro (INS) sensor on the CCD detector (optical mouse) to improve the... 

Noise phenomena, which is considered as a nuisance factor, always acts as a barrier to achieve optimal performance in all systems. In Nuclear power reactors, noise can occur due to mechanical problems such as fluctuation in control rods, failure in placing Fuel assembly in their locations properly or other factors such as creation of small bubbles in moderator. Regardless of its cause, noise leaves its impact on cross section area of material within the reactor core. Change in material cross section area shows its effect in neutron flux. Although noise is a small disturbance and may not have much impact on the reactor momentarily performance itself, in case of continuity, it can leave... 

Robot navigation and guidance is an important issue in robotic. Navigation by itself includes localization, path planning and guidance. For having a successful navigation it is necessary to succeed in all of those parts. The localization precision as basic part of localization is important and having more accurate information of robot position is important. Recently, sensors which use optical flow technic and are widely used in optical mouses are so common and they are able to measure displacement with resolution of 3 to 63 micron. In this research, a localization method for micro robot localization based on optical flow and INS sensor data fusion is presented.
Two data fusion method... 

The present study deals with designing controller for Therapeutic Exercise Robots which belongs to larger group namely Rehabilitation robots. Therapeutic exercise robots are often realized in shape of exoskeleton robots. The main line of present research is involved with, designing controller for lower limb therapeutic exercise robots and offering and implementing technical rehabilitation ideas. Firstly, in order to have a reliable position-control, considering practical limitations (e.g. system uncertainties), a robust adaptive control has been designed. Adaptive control can deals with parameters uncertainties and covering unstructured uncertainties (e.g. disturbance and noise) can be... 

One of the subjects that have been title for many research proposals in recent years is application of Nano Zero Valent Iron (NZVI) particles in contaminant removal from groundwater sources. Despite many studies being done, field application of this particles in a practical scale is not widespread yet which is due to many challenges like rapid settlement of particles or their unclear behavior through field application. The main purpose of this thesis in the first place is to find a practical and productive method for stabilization of particles and enhancement of their transport properties. To reach this goal, application of a natural polymer like starch has been studied as a solution. To... 

There are several methods for identifying unknown elements of an unknown compound. One of the common methods for this purpose, using neutron activation analysis. In conjunction with this method, different computer codes and softwares have been developed and used. One of these methods is K0 method that is a single comparator method. The code that based on this method is K0-IAEA code that is written by the International Atomic Energy Agency and access to it is free. Foremost objective of this study is to determine how to work with this code. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the results of the code, examples have taken into consideration the amount of time previously unknown elements by... 

Nowadays exoskeltons are developed because of improvements carried out in mechatronic technologies, to use in applications such as human rehabilitation and power augmentation. By reason of interaction between exoskeleton robot and human, an appropriate control strategy should be considered to implement regulated interaction force between them. As an example there are situations that a person wants to carry heavy load with this robot without suffering from weight of the load, so control of robot movements is of great importance. The aim of this thesis is dedicated to develop and implement a control strategy achieving minimum ineraction force in a 2 degree of freedom lower limb exoskeleton....