The conceptual design of balance shaft was very important process as how to locate the unbalance masses and corresponding supporting bearings. In this paper, the optimal conceptual balance shaft model was derived by using proposed objective functions for an inline 3-cylinder engine and an inline 4-cylinder one, respectively. Two kinds of optimal model were derived from simulations and efficient design guidelines was finally explained with design flowchart.

Force sensing plays an important role in minimally invasive surgery. In this study, a new asymmetric cable-driven type of micromanipulator for a surgical robot was designed, and a joint angle estimator(JAE) was designed based on the dynamical model system. Closed-loop control of the joint angle was carried out by regarding the JAE output as the feedback signal. An external force estimator was designed using a disturbance observer. The experimental results shown the correctness and validity.

This paper presents the complete dynamic model of a new six degrees of freedom (DOF) spatial 3-RPRS parallel manipulator. Further, a robust task-space trajectory tracking control is also designed for the manipulator along with a nonlinear disturbance observer. To demonstrate the efficacy and show the complete performance of the proposed controller, virtual prototype experiments are executed using one of multibody dynamics software namely MSC Adams.

A flexure-based monolithic micro manipulation stage with large workspace is designed and analyzed. The piezoelectric actuators are adopted to drive the manipulation stage. The optimized lever amplifier is integrated into the mechanism in order to compensate the stroke of the piezoelectric actuators. The working range of the manipulation stage along each axis is ± 42.31 μm, ± 48.56 μm, 0–10.28 m rad, respectively.

This paper presents a gravity unloading facility to simulate micro-gravity environment of space. The facility unloads the gravity of artificial antenna of satellite and its pointing mechanism to test the performance of the pointing mechanism on the ground. The facility consists of two layers to unload gravity hierarchically and simultaneously while the antenna pointing mechanism consists of two joints. The calculation, simulation and experiments all show the effectiveness of the method applied.

We propose two Interval Analysis based methods to characterize novel robots. Interval analysis theory allows us to consider intervals instead of values, making it possible to use computer algorithms, without the drawback of rounding errors. The first proposed method can isolate chosen interest points and is applied to the characteristic cusp and node points of 3R orthogonal manipulators. The second method encloses the robot available postures, giving complementary information on the novel robot.

The problem of dimensional synthesis of mechanisms to trace a given closed curve is solved by (a) representation of curve shape using normalized Fourier descriptors and (b) learning the relation between Fourier descriptors and mechanism dimensions by an artificial neural network (ANN). The ANN developed suggests dimensions of a four-bar mechanism with coupler curve of shape similar to the one desired. The dimensions are further refined by optimization.

This paper deals with an elasto-static analysis of a 2-DOF spherical parallel wrist where the links and the joints are considered flexible. An FEM approach is used to analyze the problem in a series of configurations of the wrist. The results are elaborated in order to obtain continuous maps of the positioning and orientation errors over the workspace of the machine.