editorial advancedcontrolinmicro-/nanosystems

Hindawi Publishing CorporationJournal of Control Science and EngineeringVolume 2012, Article ID 827479, 2 pagesdoi:10.1155/2012/827479

Editorial

Advanced Control in Micro-/Nanosystems

Qingsong Xu,1 Pak-Kin Wong,1 Minping Jia,2 Micky Rakotondrabe,3 and Li Zhang4

1 Department of Electromechanical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau,Avenue Padre Tomas Pereira Taipa, Macau

2 School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 211189, China3 Automatic Control and Micro-Mechatronic Systems (AS2M) Department, FEMTO-ST Institute,UMR CNRS 6174-UFC/ENSMM/UTBM, 24 rue Alain Savary, 25000 Besancon, France

4 Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Correspondence should be addressed to Qingsong Xu, [email protected]

Received 10 December 2012; Accepted 10 December 2012

Copyright © 2012 Qingsong Xu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Micro-/nanosystems have attracted plenty of attentionat both academia and industry within the last twodecades. Micro-/nanosystems include miniaturized systemswhose physical dimensions lie in micro-/nanoscale andmacro-/mesoscale systems which perform tasks at themicro-/nanoscale. Such systems find extensive applica-tions in micro-/nanomanipulation, micro-/nanoassembly,nanometer-resolution imaging and metrology, health andenvironmental monitoring, data storage, material science,biomedicine and biotechnology, and so forth. The scale andperformance requirement of micro-/nanosystems presenta number of challenges to the control system design.In the micro-/nanoworld, the displacements ranging fromnanometers to tens of microns and forces from piconewtonsto tens of micronewtons are mostly involved. The systemperformances are very sensitive to external environmentalconditions in terms of vibration, temperature, humidity,air velocity, and so on. Due to the precision requirement,the control system design for the micro-/nanoworld con-cerns with actuation and sensing, monitoring and model-ing, dynamics, characterization, position/force measurementtechniques, signal processing, controller design, motionplanning, hardware implementation, material fabrication,and so on.

The objective of this special issue is to report somemost recent developments and contributions in the micro-/nanosystems control. After a thorough review process, atotal of 6 out of the submitted papers have been accepted forthis special issue and present interesting results.

Piezoelectric actuators are widely used in nano-/micro-positioning systems owing to their attractive properties offast frequency response, nanometer scale resolution, andhigh stiffness. In order to achieve a precise positioning,the hysteresis nonlinearity needs to be well understoodand suppressed. To tackle this issue, G. Zhang et al.develop a memory-based parabola model to capture thehysteresis behavior using the mathematical transformation.A new converging point was updated to compensate forthe prediction error when the hysteresis path hits the upperconverging point. The experimental and simulation resultsdemonstrate that the prediction accuracy of the proposedmodel is noticeably improved as compared with the modelwithout memory operator.

Air pollution is one of the most challenging problemsin many cities nowadays. The increased use of motorvehicles causes the amount of exhaust emissions to increasedramatically, which makes the problem more serious. Dieselengines are used extensively in buses and trucks; thus they arethe major roadside emitters, posing a significant threat to thehealth of the road users. In order to reduce these emissions,the combustion process of the engines has to be controlled. Anew approach for modeling the performance and emissionsof diesel engine is proposed by P.-K. Wong et al. The adoptedrelevance vector machine (RVM) method is stated clearlyand a feasible learning algorithm is given with technicaldetails. The conducted experimental comparative studiesdemonstrate the superiority of proposed RVM modeling

2 Journal of Control Science and Engineering

approach over the conventional ANN ones. This paperrepresents a new attempt using RVM.

The status of microparticle in air is crucial for our dailylife. Forecasting of air pollution is a popular and importanttopic in recent years due to the health impact caused byair pollution. It is necessary to build an early warningsystem, which provides forecast and also alerts health alarmto local inhabitants by medical practitioners and the localgovernment. C. M. Vong et al. propose the air pollutantregression modeling and time series prediction using supportvector machines technique. The air pollutant modeling andprediction for Macau area can also be extended to otherareas. By acquiring the real data, five SVM models withdifferent kernel functions are established and their perfor-mances are well investigated. With a series of comparativestudies, it is concluded that the SVM with linear or RBFkernel is capable of predicting the air pollutant accurately.

Engine power, brake-specific fuel consumption, andemissions relate closely to air ratio (i.e., lambda) among allthe engine variables. An accurate and adaptive model forlambda prediction is essential to effective lambda control forlong term. H. C. Wong et al. present a new model predictivecontrol algorithm for air ratio regulation based on anemerging technique, relevance vector machine (RVM). Thiswork gives good supporting evidence that RVM predictivecontroller may be used as a useful scheme to replace the con-ventional proportional-integral controller. The methodologyhas been clearly described while RVM model for engine air-ratio had been successfully implemented and tested on a realcar with a satisfied performance, on which RVM model hadnot been done before.

Flexible electronics is an emerging technology witha tremendous challenge, but has a great potential forapplications in display, portable electronics, healthcare, andso forth. So far, flexible electronics has been limited toelectronic devices such as diodes and transistors. J. Zhou etal. present the fabrication of high frequency surface acousticwave (SAW) devices on AlN films, which have potentials inflexible microfluidic applications. The structural propertiesof AlN films on polymer substrate are also characterized. Theobtained resonant frequencies of the SAW devices show nosevere deterioration in acoustic speed on the soft substrate,and the results are consistent with the theoretical modeling.

Finally, aiming at portable applications, P. Jin et al.present a new integrated tiny mass sensor based on the thinfilm bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR) and CMOS technol-ogy. The fabricated FBAR the has resonance frequency of1.878 GHz and Q factor of 1200. The precision of the wholeprocessing chip is 1 KHz with the FBAR frequency gap from25 kHz to 25 MHz. The whole FBAR signal processing circuitis verified with 0.18 µm RF/Mixed-signal CMOS process. Itis shown that the size of the entire chip with pads is only1300 µm × 950 µm, which can be connected with FBAR toprocess its RF sensor signal and show mass change valuedirectly.

We hope that the readers will find the special issueinteresting and stimulating and expect that the includedpapers contribute to the further advance in the domain of

micro-/nanosystems control. In addition, we would like toexpress our heartfelt thanks to all the authors who havesubmitted their papers and all the reviewers who helpedhandling the papers for this special issue.

Qingsong XuPak-Kin Wong

Minping JiaMicky Rakotondrabe

Li Zhang

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