Artificial Insemination System by Male and Female Micro Robots
In the biomedical field, the precise operation is required to achieve cell injection and genome analysis. To enhance these technologies, the special instrument with higher accuracy can provide the solution to these requirement. Several sophisticated instruments have been developed and some of them are equipped with the advanced sensor and actuator. In the meantime, the micro robotics has the potential application to many fields such the biomedical engineering as well as micro-engineering. For these years, our group have developed many small robots for the application to the precision engineering. In this report, the unique artificial insemination system operated by male and female micro robots is proposed and the successful experimental results are described. The small robot, which is approximately 1 cubic inch, is composed of piezo element and electromagnet to move precisely with the manner of an inch worm. And one small robot has the micro pipette actuated by the micro pump while another one has the special micro capillary which can incubate the fertilized egg. In the exper iment , the egg and the spermatozoon of fish are implemented into the micro injector and the micro incubator on these small robots. Two small robots can navigate each other to inseminate by using acoustic, optical and mechanical touch trigger switch sensors and reactive based sequential manner. And the fertilized egg in the micro incubator was successfully hatched after two weeks later under the temperature and water condition control instrument. Artificial Insemination System by Male and Female Micro Robots
A Low Cost Passive Acoustic Resonator for Insect-Like Microrobotic Systems
This paper presents a novel implementation of a low-cost passive acoustic resonator for observing and amplifying inaudible sound produced by a microfork of an insect-like microrobot. The implementation demonstrates an alternative way of finding a simple yet practical, low cost, and effective solution for amplifying sound by fundamental of physics, instead of designing a complex electronic amplifier with much relatively higher cost. The implemented passive acoustic resonator has performed remarkably well, yielding sufficiently audible voice for the insect-like robots even for
Numerical tools applied to power reactor noise analysis
In order to be able to calculate the space- and frequency-dependent neutron noise in real inhomogeneous systems in two-group theory, a code was developed for the calculation of the Green's function (dynamic transfer function) of such systems. This paper reports on the development as well as the test and application of the numerical tools employed. The code that was developed yields the space-dependence of the fluctuations of the neutron flux induced by fluctuating properties of the medium in the two-group diffusion approximation and in a two-dimensional representation of heterogeneous systems, for both critical systems and non-critical systems with an external source. Some applications of these tools to power reactor noise analysis are then described, including the unfolding of the parameters of the noise source from the induced neutron noise, measured at a few discrete locations throughout the core. Other concrete applications concern the study of the space-dependence of the Decay Ratio in Boiling Water Reactors, the noise-based estimation of the Moderator Temperature Coefficient of reactivity in Pressurized Water Reactors, the modeling of the beam- and shell-mode core-barrel vibrations in Pressurized Water Reactors, and the investigation of the validity of the point-kinetic approximation in subcritical systems driven by an external source. In most of these applications, calculations performed using the code are compared with at-power plant measurements. Power reactor noise analysis applications of the above type, i.e. core monitoring without disturbing plant operation, is of particular interest in the framework of the extensive program of power uprates worldwide.