<title>Electrorheological-fluid-based force feedback device</title>

Abstract

Force feedback from remote or virtual operations is needed for numerous technologies including robotics, teleoperated surgery, games and others. To address this need, the authors are investigating the use of electrorheological fluids (ERF) for their property to change the viscosity under electrical stimulation. This property offers the capability to produce feedback haptic devices that can be controlled in response to remote or virtual stiffness conditions. Forces applied at a robot endeffector due to a compliant environment can be reflected to the user using such an ERF device where a change in the system viscosity in proportion to the force to be transmitted. This paper describes the analytical modeling and experiments that are currently underway to develop an ERF based force feedback element.

On a class of nonlinear problems involving a p(x)-Laplace type operator

“…For more information on modelling physical phenomena by equations involving p(x)-growth conditions we refer to [1], [5], [13], [24], [26], [30]. The appearance of such physical models was facilitated by the development of variable Lebesgue and Sobolev spaces, L p(x) and W 1,p(x) , where p(x) is a real-valued function.…”

Infinitely many solutions for elliptic problems with variable exponent and nonlinear boundary conditions

“…ER fluids have also been proposed to have potential applications in flexible electronics and Motorola filed a patent application for mobile device applications in 2006. Further information on properties, modelling and the applications of variable exponent spaces to these fluids can be found in [1,2,4,6,8,10,12,[18][19][20]. These are all very interesting matters that sustain our determination to investigate problems with p(·)-growth conditions but, as usually, there is a downside.…”

“…The interest for such problems is based on the multiple possibilities to apply them. There are applications in elastic mechanics [30], in the mathematical modeling of non-Newtonian fluids [6,12,[18][19][20][21][22][23]26] and in image restoration [5]. To be more specific, we recall that some of the first applications are concerning the electrorheological fluids, shortly, the ER fluids.…”

Well-Posedness Results for Anisotropic Nonlinear Elliptic Equations with Variable Exponent and L¹-Data

“…The experimental research has been done mainly in the USA, for instance in NASA laboratories. For more information on properties, modelling and the application of variable exponent spaces to these fluids, we refer to Diening [6], Rajagopal and Ruzicka [22], and Ruzicka [24]. In this paper, the operator involved in (1.1) is more general than the p(.…”

“…This phenomenon is known as the Winslow effect. For some technical applications, consult Pfeiffer et al [22]. Electrorheological fluids have been used in robotics and space technology.…”