Cedrat Technologies, innovation in mechatronics

Actuation is used in all vehicles (aircraft, spacecraft, ground vehicles, etc) to control the position and/or attitude of the vehicle, and also to deploy or retract equipment, particularly for embedded optic instruments (cameras, telescopes). As such, the actuation is a safety critical system, particularly when humans could be catastrophically affected by failures within the system. Applications for actuation are flight controls, landing gear, rotors, suspension, antennae steering, valves, scanning, positioning using hydraulic, electromechanical, magnetic and piezo actuators. In aircraft there is a common goal to reduce the number of hydraulic actuators in vehicles and eventually to replace them completely by electric actuators.

Off-pump Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting (CABG) is still today a technically difficult procedure. In fact, the mechanical stabilizers used to locally suppress the heart excursion have been demonstrated to exhibit significant residual motion. We therefore propose a novel active stabilizer which is able to compensate for this residual motion. The interaction between the heart and a mechanical stabilizer is first assessed in vivo on an animal model. Then, the principle of active stabilization, based on the high speed vision-based control of a compliant mechanism, is presented. In vivo experimental results are given using a prototype which structure is compatible with a minimally invasive approach.

Recent requirements for accuracy and resolution demand higher quality in the machining of precision parts in many industries—such as optics, automotive and aerospace—by free form machining. The required operations are possible by using expensive manufacturing equipment in parallel with several processes such as grinding and polishing. By using a new fast tool servo, the so-called servo piezo tool SPT400MML, driven by a piezoelectric actuator for the precision diamond turning of non-symmetrical surfaces, components can be machined with a fast motion control of the tool (diamond or carbide).

Actuators are key elements of air- and spacecrafts. In the recent years the concept of the more-electric aircraft pushed the development of electrical actuation systems to substitute hitherto used hydraulic actuators in a broad range of applications such as flight control, landing gear and brake actuation.

Successful commissioning of the first flight application for C. T. in ESA / ROSETTA mission. The ROSETTA satellite has been successfully launched the 2nd of March 2004 from Kourou, French Guyana, using an Ariane-5 G+ launcher. The rendezvous with the new targeted comet “Churyumov - Gerasimenko” is expected in November 2014.

The XY200M is an XY piezo stage coming from CEDRAT TECHNOLOGIES lab and which was newly designed according to space needs defined with CNES (the French space agency). This XY stage benefi ts from the heritage of a former XY stage developed for ESA (European Space Agency) in the frame of Rosetta / Midas space mission which will launch in the beginning of 2003. It is based on two pairs of APA200M, Amplifi ed Piezo Actuators displaying 200 µm of stroke each, arranged in cross configuration around a central ring.

This paper reviews some concepts used for active vibration control and vibration isolation. It is divided into two parts. Part 1 reviews some control strategies based on collocated control systems, which offer promising results for space and civil engineering applications. Part 2 (starting at section 4) is focused on automobile applications.