Members of Prof. Shorya Awtar’s research group, the Precision Systems Design Lab (PSDL), won two Best Paper Awards at the ASME 2013 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC), which was held in Portland, OR this fall. The two awards were presented at two different conferences within IDETC.
Justin Beroz, John Hart, and Awtar’s paper entitled “Extensible-Link Kinematic Model for Determining Motion Characteristics of Compliant Mechanisms” won the Best Paper Award in Compliant Mechanisms at the 37th Mechanisms and Robotics Conference for “significant contribution to the theory and application of compliant mechanisms.” The paper describes an analytical model for better understanding the motion characteristics of arbitrary planar compliant mechanisms for high-accuracy motion applications.
The second paper entitled, “MEMS Based XY Stage with Large Displacement” was authored by Mohammad Olfatnia, Leqing Cui, Pankaj Chopra, and Awtar and won the Best Paper Award at the 7th International Conference on Micro and Nano Systems. Their paper discusses a novel parallel-kinematic micro XY stage that employs electrostatic comb-drive actuators. The bi-directional displacement range demonstrated by this micro XY stage is one of the largest that has been reported in the technical literature.
Details of this research are available at the PSDL website: http://psdl.engin.umich.edu
