An effective nonlinear dynamic formulation to analyze grasping capability of soft pneumatic robotic gripper

Soft pneumatic robotic grippers have found extensive applica-tions across various engineering domains,which prompts active research due to their splendid compliance,high flex-ibility,and safe human-robot interaction over conventional stiff counterparts.Previously simplified rod-based models prin-cipally focused on clarifying overall large deformation and bending postures of soft grippers from static or quasi-static perspectives,whereas it is challenging to elaborate grasping characteristics of soft grippers without considering contact interaction and nonlinear large deformation behaviors.To address this,based on absolute nodal coordinate formulation(ANCF),comprehensively allowing for structural complexity,geometric,material and boundary nonlinearities,and incorpor-ating Coulomb’friction law with a multiple-point contact method,we put forward an effective nonlinear dynamic mod-eling approach for exploring grasping capability of soft grip-per.Moreover,we solved the established dynamic equations using Generalized-αscheme,and conducted thorough numer-ical simulation analysis on a three-jaw soft pneumatic gripper(SPG)in terms of grasping configurations,displacements and contact forces.The proposed dynamic approach can accurately both describe complicated deformed configurations along with stress distribution and provide a feasible solution to simulate grasping targets,whose effectiveness and precision were analyzed theoretically and verified experimentally,which may shed new light on devising and optimizing other multi-functional SPGs.

Contact dynamics of elasto-plastic thin beams simulated via absolute nodal coordinate formulation

Under the frame of multibody dynamics, the contact dynamics of elasto-plastic spatial thin beams is numerically studied by using the spatial thin beam elements of absolute nodal coordinate formulation（ANCF）. The internal force of the elasto-plastic spatial thin beam element is derived under the assumption that the plastic strain of the beam element depends only on its longitudinal deformation.A new body-fixed local coordinate system is introduced into the spatial thin beam element of ANCF for efficient contact detection in the contact dynamics simulation. The linear isotropic hardening constitutive law is used to describe the elasto-plastic deformation of beam material, and the classical return mapping algorithm is adopted to evaluate the plastic strains. A multi-zone contact approach of thin beams previously proposed by the authors is also introduced to detect the multiple contact zones of beams accurately, and the penalty method is used to compute the normal contact force of thin beams in contact. Four numerical examples are given to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed elasto-plastic spatial thin beam element of ANCF for flexible multibody system dynamics.

QoS-Aware Dynamic Resource Management in Heterogeneous Mobile Cloud Computing Networks

In mobile cloud computing(MCC) systems,both the mobile access network and the cloud computing network are heterogeneous,implying the diverse configurations of hardware,software,architecture,resource,etc.In such heterogeneous mobile cloud(HMC) networks,both radio and cloud resources could become the system bottleneck,thus designing the schemes that separately and independently manage the resources may severely hinder the system performance.In this paper,we aim to design the network as the integration of the mobile access part and the cloud computing part,utilizing the inherent heterogeneity to meet the diverse quality of service(QoS)requirements of tenants.Furthermore,we propose a novel cross-network radio and cloud resource management scheme for HMC networks,which is QoS-aware,with the objective of maximizing the tenant revenue while satisfying the QoS requirements.The proposed scheme is formulated as a restless bandits problem,whose "indexability" feature guarantees the low complexity with scalable and distributed characteristics.Extensive simulation results are presented to demonstrate the significant performance improvement of the proposed scheme compared to the existing ones.

Pseudospectral method for optimal propellantless rendezvous using geomagnetic Lorentz force

A charged spacecraft is subject to the Lorentz force when it orbits a central body with a magnetic field. The induced Lorentz force provides a new mean of propellantless electromagnetic propulsion for orbital control. Modeling the Earth magnetic field as a tilted dipole that co-rotates with the Earth, this paper develops a nonlinear dynamical model that describes the relative motion of the Lorentz spacecraft about an arbitrary reference orbit. Based on the proposed dynamical model, feasibility of Lorentz-propelled rendezvous with no restrictions on the initial states is investigated. The rendezvous problem is then formulated as an optimal control problem, and solved with the Gauss pseudospectral method（GPM）. Numerical simulations substantiate the validity of proposed model and method, and results show that the propellantless rendezvous is achieved at both fixed and free final time.