A Magnetically and Thermally Controlled Liquid Metal Variable Stiffness Material

Smart materials that can actively tune their stiffness are of great interest to many fields, including the construction industry, medical devices, industrial machines, and soft robotics. However, developing a material that can offer a large range of stiffness change and rapid tuning remains a challenge. Herein, a liquid metal variable stiffness material (LMVSM) that can actively and rapidly tune its stiffness by applying an external magnetic field or by changing the temperature is developed. The LMVSM is composed of three layers: a gallium–iron magnetorheological fluid (Ga–Fe MRF) layer for providing variable stiffness, a nickel–chromium wire layer for Joule heating, and a soft heat dissipation layer for accelerating heating and rapid cooling. The stiffness can be rapidly increased by 4 times upon the application of a magnetic field or 10 times by solidifying the Ga–Fe MRF. Finally, the LMVSM is attached to a pneumatically controlled soft robotic gripper to actively tune its load capacity, demonstrating its potential to be further developed into smart components that can be widely adopted by smart devices.     

Multi-stage dynamic event-triggered containment control of nonlinear multi-agent systems with input-bounded leaders and time-varying delay

This article immerses in the event-triggered containment control problem for a Lipschitz-like nonlinear multi-agent system with multiple active leaders. First, two event-triggered mechanisms with internal dynamic variables are designed in both sensor-observer (S-O) and controller-actuator (C-A) channels to monitor data transmission and reduce communication burden. Second, an observer is constructed with the aid of the output information to estimate the states that cannot be acquired directly. Then, a control protocol considering time-varying communications delays is proposed based on the observer. Third, the boundedness analysis of the containment error system is constructed by Lyapunov stability theory, the sufficient conditions are given in light of strict feasible LMIs. Finally, the validity of the proposed controller is verified by two simulations.