Engineering Commons^™

Design, Manufacturing And Control Of An Advanced High-Precision Robotic System For Microsurgery, Arezoo Ebrahimi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Microsurgeries like ophthalmic surgery confront many challenges like limited workspace and hand motion, steady hand movements, manipulating delicate thin tissues, and holding the instrument in place for a long time. New developments in robotically-assisted surgery can highly benefits this field and facilitate those complicated surgeries. Robotic eye surgery can save time, reduce surgical complications and inspire more delicate surgical procedures that cannot be done currently by surgeon’s hands. In this thesis work, the requirements for ophthalmic surgeries were studied and based on that a robotic system with 6 DOF is proposed and designed. This robotic

system is capable of handling …

Implementation Of A Novel Hydraulic Hybrid Powertrain In A Sports Utility Vehicle, Michael Sprengel, Tyler Bleazard, Hiral Haria, Monika Ivantysynova

School of Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications

Hydraulic hybrid transmissions offer an efficient and high performance alternative to electric hybrid transmission in on-road vehicles. One of the principle benefits of hydraulic over electric hybrids is the higher power density offered by their energy storage media. This enables hydraulic hybrids to capture virtually all of the available kinetic energy from braking. In contrast electric hybrids are often forced to dissipate part of this energy through friction brakes due to the lower power density inherent in their energy storage media. To date various hydraulic hybrid architectures have been investigated and put into production. However as is typically true there …

Simulation, Control And Testing Of Advanced Hydraulic Hybrid Transmissions, Italo M. Ramos, Monika Ivantysynova, Michael Sprengel

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Hydraulic hybrids transmissions have the potentially to substantially improve the fuel efficiency of on road vehicles. In fact recent studies have demonstrated that this technology can improve fuel economy by upwards of 30% over competing electric hybrids. To further improve the fuel economy and performance of this technology a novel blended hydraulic hybrid transmission has been constructed at the Maha Fluid Power Research Center. While this novel hybrid architecture created by the Maha lab has many benefits over conventional systems, there are a number of control challenges present due to several discrete modes of operation. And though improving fuel economy …

Design And Implementation Of An Interactive Animatronic System For Guest Response Analysis, Brian Burns

Phi Kappa Phi Research Symposium (2012-2016)

In theme park based entertainment applications, there is a need for interactive, autonomous animatronic systems to create engaging and compelling experiences for the guests. The animatronic figures must identify the guests and recognize their status in dynamic interactions for enhanced acceptance and effectiveness as socially interactive agents, in the general framework of human-robot interactions. The design and implementation of an interactive, autonomous animatronic system in form of a tabletop dragon, Kronos, and the comparisons of guest responses in its passive and interactive modes are presented in this work. The dragon capabilities include a four degrees-of-freedom head, moving wings, tail, jaw, …

Dcpp/Polygait Inventory Control System, Logan Pace, Robert Garlinghouse

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

This report discusses a proposed system to improve upon inventory management issues experienced in the M&TE Tool room for the PG&E Diablo Canyon Power plant. Effective inventory tracking and management is an important characteristic of any organization handling physical assets, and without the proper system in place, companies may lose expensive items and waste time by not having equipment available when needed. The tool room is experiencing inventory shrinkage of M&TE equipment nearing $100,000 per year largely because of an inefficient checkout system that fails to keep employees accountable for the tools they check out. Even more costly than the …

Investigation Of Distributed Model Predictive Control For Economic Load Shifting In Building Hvac Systems, Peter Kinsella

Theses and Dissertations

One of the major challenges that building owners and operators face is maintaining a low cost of operation. In certain markets within the U.S., electrical cost varies throughout the day; it is higher during times of peak demand. This leaves the customer the incentive to cut back electrical use during peak demand periods. Since 40% of the peak electrical demand is due to the operation of the building HVAC system alone, the opportunity exists for shifting the building cooling load to off-peak hours. This can be done by pre-cooling the space, thereby using the building mass as a sort of …

An Elaborate Data Set On Human Gait And The Effect Of Mechanical Perturbations, Jason K. Moore, Sandra K. Hnat, Antonie J. Van Den Bogert

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications

Here we share a rich gait data set collected from fifteen subjects walking at three speeds on an instrumented treadmill. Each trial consists of 120 s of normal walking and 480 s of walking while being longitudinally perturbed during each stance phase with pseudo-random fluctuations in the speed of the treadmill belt. A total of approximately 1.5 h of normal walking (>5000 gait cycles) and 6 h of perturbed walking (>20,000 gait cycles) is included in the data set. We provide full body marker trajectories and ground reaction loads in addition to a presentation of processed data that …