Liwei Lin (Advisor)

Agility and trajectory control are two desirable features for robotics, but they become very challenging for soft robots without rigid structures to support rapid manipulations. Here, a curved piezoelectric thin film driven at its structural resonant frequency is used as the main body of an insect-scale soft robot for its fast translational movements, and two electrostatic footpads are used for its swift rotational motions. These two schemes are simultaneously executed during operations through a simple two-wire connection arrangement. A high relative centripetal acceleration of 28 body...

Optical packaging differs from traditional packaging in several ways, and many of these differences emerge from the need to protect the electrical, mechanical, and optical components of a system while preserving its exposure to the environment. Thus, the materials and packaging processes involved in such a system must be chosen with these goals in mind. This research project seeks to ascertain reliable and feasible hermetic packaging methods to ensure mechanical durability as well as insulation from electrical leakage for an optical feed-through operating in highly variable...

Employing the Electrochemical Double Layers (EDL) phenomenon and porous electrode materials, the supercapacitor have an astonishing high specific capacitance, typically on the order of thousands of times greater than common capacitors. In this project, thanks to MEMS technology, we have for the first time brought the supercapacitor concept into micro scale. Different from its sandwich-like macro scale configuration, a novel planar structure has been proposed and implemented. This device has the wide potential applications such as micro power sources and circuitry components with...

This project intends to miniaturize the conventional chemical vapor deposition (CVD) system into the micrometers range in dimension. It is believed that Micro-CVD provides better control on the gas flow, gas temperature and gas species in some aspects. This may result in the sythesis of unique nanostructures with new properties. Based on the idea, a prototype micro machined silicon structure is fabricated in the Microlab and is used to synthesize carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene. The CNTs can directly be grown on varies of substrate including paper and plastic, and they are of...