Physical Sensors & Devices

Research that includes:

  • Silicon MEMS actuators: comb, electro-thermal, and plastic deformation
  • Precision electronic sensing and measurements of capacitive, frequency, and coulombic MEMS variables
  • Structures and architectures for gyroscopes, accelerometers, micro strain gauges for direct application to rigid structures e.g., steel, and levitated MEMS

BPN934: Display Compatible pMUTs

Sedat Pala
2020

Ultrasonic transducers have been used in many applications from medical imaging to range finding. In recent years, applications have been further expanded to hand-held devices such as fingerprint sensors, and gesture recognitions thanks to advancements in micromachined ultrasonic transducers (MUTs). Compared to conventional ultrasound devices, MEMS ultrasonic transducers have advantages of higher resolution, higher bandwidth, and lower power consumption. More recently, products to interact electronic devices from a distance have been introduced. These products either require an allocated...

BPN918: Magnetically Powered, Untethered Soft Robots with Bioinspired Bone-and-Flesh Constructs

Renxiao Xu
Fanping Sui
2020

We present a new class of soft robots inspired by the bone-and-flesh construct in human body for fast, deterministic actuation. Two distinctive advancements have been achieved: (1) untethered robots with external magnetic power, boasting high normalized power density of ~2*10-2/s (40-6,000,000x higher than most reports); (2) ultrafast and deterministic-shape actuation in ~0.1 seconds (100x faster than the state-of-the-art). Inspired by the natural human architecture, our soft robots with different elastomer (flesh) structures and magnet (bone) placements can complete various tasks...