Sharif Digital Repository

Sophisticated surgeons are widely indicating the use of surgical robots in order to reject human error, increase precision, and speed. Among well-known robotic mechanisms, parallel robots are broadly more investigated regarding their special characters as higher acceleration, speed, and accuracy, and less weight. Specific surgical procedures confine, and restrict their workspace, while controlling and validating the robots are complicated regarding to their complex dynamic. To this end, in this paper, a 6-DOF robot, with rotary manipulators, is designed and controlled. Addressing nonlinearity of parallel robots, an innovative methodology is formulated to robustly penalize the error of... 

Sophisticated surgeons are widely indicating the use of surgical robots in order to reject human error, increase precision, and speed. Among well-known robotic mechanisms, parallel robots are broadly more investigated regarding their special characters as higher acceleration, speed, and accuracy, and less weight. Specific surgical procedures confine and restrict their workspace, while controlling and validating the robots are complicated based on their complex dynamic. To this end, in this paper, a 6-DOF robot, with linear manipulators, is designed and controlled. Addressing the inherent nonlinearity of the robot mechanism, an adaptive PID manipulator is employed and validated with nonlinear... 

With the exception of a few works, the current approaches to aerial manipulation control do not typically consider the system constraints in the control design process. Also, the issue of closed-loop stability in the presence of system constraints is not thoroughly analyzed. In this paper, a novel multi-stage model predictive control (MPC)-based approach for aerial manipulation is proposed to ensure the closed-loop stability in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances, while satisfying the operational constraints. The detailed nonlinear model of a general aerial manipulator, consisting of a quadrotor equipped with a 3 degrees of freedom manipulator, is first developed... 

Diatoms are unicellular microalga found in soil and almost every aquatic environment (marine and fresh water). Biogenic silica and diatoms are attractive for biotechnological and industrial applications, especially in the field of biomedicine, industrial/synthetic manufacturing processes, and biomedical/pharmaceutical sciences. Deposition of silica by diatoms allows them to create micro- or nanoscale structures which may be utilized in nanomedicine and especially in drug/gene delivery. Diatoms with their unique architectures, good thermal stability, suitable surface area, simple chemical functionalization/modification procedures, ease of genetic manipulations, optical/photonic... 

Separation and isolation of suspended submicron particles is fundamental to a wide range of applications, including desalination, chemical processing, and medical diagnostics. Ion concentration polarization (ICP), an electrokinetic phenomenon in micro-nano interfaces, has gained attention due to its unique ability to manipulate molecules or particles in suspension and solution. Less well understood, though, is the ability of this phenomenon to generate circulatory fluid flow, and how this enables and enhances continuous particle capture. Here, we perform a comprehensive study of a low-voltage ICP, demonstrating a new electrokinetic method for extracting submicron particles via flow-enhanced... 

One of the most arduous challenges in tissue engineering is neovascularization, without which there is a lack of nutrients delivered to a target tissue. Angiogenesis should be completed at an optimal density and within an appropriate period of time to prevent cell necrosis. Failure to meet this challenge brings about poor functionality for the tissue in comparison with the native tissue, extensively reducing cell viability. Prior studies devoted to angiogenesis have provided researchers with some biomaterial scaffolds and cell choices for angiogenesis. For example, while most current angiogenesis approaches require a variety of stimulatory factors ranging from biomechanical to biomolecular... 

Oil reservoirs are very complex with geological heterogeneities that appear on all scales. Proper modeling of the spatial distribution of these heterogeneities is crucial, affecting all aspects of flow and, consequently, the reservoir performance. Reservoir connectivity and conductivity evaluation is of great importance for decision-making on various possible development scenarios including infill drilling projects. This can be addressed by using the percolation theory approach. This statistical approach considers a hypothesis that the reservoir can be split into either permeable (good sands) or impermeable flow units (poor sands) and assumes that the continuity of permeability contrasts... 

TiO 2 dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) in the form of double-layer films, containing an under-layer and an over-layer, with various crystal structures (i.e., anatase and rutile phases) and morphologies (i.e., nanoparticle and nanowire) were reported. It was found that the photovoltaic performance of TiO 2 DSSCs depends on the morphology, crystal structure, light scattering effect, optical band gap energy and arrangement of the under- and over-layer films. The double-layer solar cell made of anatase-TiO 2 nanoparticles as the under-layer and anatase-TiO 2 nanowires as the over-layer (i.e., AW solar cell) showed the highest power conversion efficiency and fill factor of 6.34% and 62.6%,... 

In this paper a variational framework for joint segmentation and motion estimation is employed for inspecting heart in Cine MRI sequences. A functional including Mumford-Shah segmentation and optical flow based dense motion estimation is approximated using the phase-field technique. The minimizer of the functional provides an optimum motion field and edge set by considering both spatial and temporal discontinuities. Exploiting calculus of variation principles, multiple partial differential equations associated with the Euler-Lagrange equations of the functional are extracted, first. Next, the finite element method is used to discretize the resulting PDEs for numerical solution. Several...