The growing need for manipulators capable of handling delicate objects with care and coexisting safely with humans has brought soft robots to the forefront as a practical and cost-effective solution. In this context, this paper aims to explore soft grippers, a unique and versatile subset of soft robots. It provides an overview of various soft grasping techniques and materials, highlighting their respective advantages and limitations, along with showcasing several designed and tested models. As medicine and agriculture are acknowledged as pivotal domains required for basic human survival, this paper explores the potential applications of soft robotic grippers in these respective fields. Additionally, it further investigates how soft grippers can contribute to reducing cost and enhancing production efficiency while addressing practical relevant solutions. Considering the escalating environmental threats, particularly in oceans and coral reefs, the paper examines the potential of soft grasping underwater to mitigate these challenges, considered as crucial for conserving the fisheries industry and pertinent economic fields. Lastly, it outlines the current challenges and future prospects of soft grippers, emphasizing the importance of overcoming obstacles through finding solutions such as using bioinspiration to create effective technical solutions and highlighting the importance of commercialization. © 2024 Elsevier B.V.
Charge controlled memristor-less memcapacitor emulator
Recently, many promising applications are oriented towards the new memristive elements. But since these elements are not commercially available yet, the memristive elements emulators are very important. Introduced is a new memcapacitor emulator without using any memristor. The circuit concept and mathematical modelling are discussed analytically and numerically to validate the operation of the proposed emulator. Moreover, the proposed emulator is assembled using commercial off-the-shelf components and verified using PSpice simulations. © 2012 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.
A Study on Fractional Power-Law Applications and Approximations
The frequency response of the fractional-order power-law filter can be approximated by different techniques, which eventually affect the expected performance. Fractional-order control systems introduce many benefits for applications like compensators to achieve robust frequency and additional degrees of freedom in the tuning process. This paper is a comparative study of five of these approximation techniques. The comparison focuses on their magnitude error, phase error, and implementation complexity. The techniques under study are the Carlson, continued fraction expansion (CFE), Padé, Charef, and MATLAB curve-fitting tool approximations. Based on this comparison, the recommended approximation techniques are the curve-fitting MATLAB tool and the continued fraction expansion (CFE). As an application, a low-pass power-law filter is realized on a field-programmable analog array (FPAA) using two techniques, namely the curve-fitting tool and the CFE. The experiment aligns with and validates the numerical results. © 2024 by the authors.
Non linear dynamics of memristor based 3rd order oscillatory system
In this paper, we report for the first time the nonlinear dynamics of three memristor based phase shift oscillators, and consider them as a plausible solution for the realization of parametric oscillation as an autonomous linear time variant system. Sustained oscillation is reported through oscillating resistance while time dependent poles are present. The memristor based phase shift oscillator is explored further by varying the parameters so as to present the resistance of the memristor as a time varying parameter, thus potentially eliminating the need of external periodic forces in order for it to oscillate. Multi memristors, used simultaneously with similar and different parameters, are investigated in this paper. Mathematical formulas for analyzing such oscillators are verified with simulation results and are found to be in good agreement. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
DISH: Digital image steganography using stochastic-computing with high-capacity
Stochastic computing is a relatively new approach to computing that has gained interest in recent years due to its potential for low-power and high-noise environments. It is a method of computing that uses probability to represent and manipulate data, therefore it has applications in areas such as signal processing, machine learning, and cryptography. Stochastic steganography involves hiding a message within a cover image using a statistical model. Unlike traditional steganography techniques that use deterministic algorithms to embed the message, stochastic steganography uses a probabilistic approach to hide the message in a way that makes it difficult for an adversary to detect. Due to this error robustness and large bit streams stochastic computing, they are well suited for high capacity and secure image steganography. In this paper, as per the authors’ best knowledge, image steganography using stochastic computing based on linear feedback shift register (LFSR) is proposed for the first time. In the proposed technique, the cover image is converted to stochastic representation instead of the binary one, and then a secret image is embedded in it. The resulting stego image has a high PSNR value transmitted with no visual trace of the hidden image. The final results are stego image with PSNR starting from 30 dB and a maximum payload up to 40 bits per pixel (bpp) with an effective payload up to 28 bpp. The proposed method achieves high security and high capability of the number of stored bits in each pixel. Thus, the proposed method can prove a vital solution for high capacity and secure image steganography, which can then be extended to other types of steganography. © 2024, The Author(s).
Meminductor response under periodic current excitations
Recently, the mem-elements-based circuits have been addressed frequently in the nonlinear circuit theory due to their unique behavior. Thus, the modeling and characterizing of the mem-elements has become essential, especially studying their response under any excitation signal. This paper investigates the response of the meminductor under DC, sinusoidal, and periodic current signals for the first time. Furthermore, a meminductor emulator is developed to fit the obtained formulas which are built using commercial off the shelf components. The proposed analysis offers closed form expressions for the meminductance for each case. Moreover, many fundamentals and properties are derived to understand the responses such as the maximum saturation time in case of the DC response. A general closed form expression for the meminductance is derived under any periodic waveform, and this formula has been validated by applying a square wave as an example. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.
Enhanced removal of crystal violet using rawfava bean peels, its chemically activated carbon compared with commercial activated carbon
Crystal violet is a basic dye that is widely used by various industries, such as textiles and paints. These industries discharge their effluents, contaminated with crystal violet, into water streams, and these effluents have an adverse effect on aquatic organisms, the environment, and human health. Crystal violet is a basic dye that is widely used by various industries, such as textiles and paints. These industries discharge their effluents, contaminated with crystal violet, into water streams, and these effluents have an adverse effect on aquatic organisms, the environment, and human health. Hence, this paper is directed at studying the removal of crystal violet using environmentally friendly, cost-effective adsorbent materials such as raw fava bean (RFP-H3F), and chemically activated carbon (H3F) in comparison to commercial activated carbon (CAC).Various characterization techniques are applied, such as XRD, FT-IR,and SEM analyses. Then, the process of optimizing is shown through some preliminary experiments and a Response Surface Methodology (RSM) experiment to find the best conditions for removing crystal violet efficiently. Results revealed that the raw fava bean peels and the commercial activated carbon have the maximum removal efficiency of 95 %, and 83 % respectively, after 180 min of contact time. It is hypothesized that raw fava bean peels (RFP) and chemically activated carbon using phosphoric acid RFP-H3F will exhibit comparable efficiency in removing crystal violet when compared to commercial activated carbon (CAC). Various characterization techniques, including X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR),and scanning electron microscopy (SEM), are applied to analyze the properties of the adsorbent materials. Afterwards, the optimization process is displayed through some preliminary experiments followed by a Response Surface Methodology (RSM) experiment to obtain the optimum conditions, which achieve high crystal violet removal efficiency. The results demonstrate that both raw fava bean peels and commercial activated carbon exhibit significant removal efficiencies, with raw fava bean peels achieving a maximum removal efficiency of 95 % and commercial activated carbon achieving 83 %. © 2023 The Authors
Memristor-based voltage-controlled relaxation oscillators
This paper introduces two voltage-controlled memristor-based reactance-less oscillators with analytical and circuit simulations. Two different topologies which are R-M and M-R are discussed as a function of the reference voltage where the generalized formulas of the oscillation frequency and conditions for oscillation for each topology are derived. The effect of the reference voltage on the circuit performance is studied and validated through different examples using PSpice simulations. A memristor-based voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is introduced as an application for the proposed circuits which is nano-size and more efficient compared to the conventional VCOs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Reconfigurable hardware implementation of K-nearest neighbor algorithm on FPGA
Nowadays, Machine Learning is commonly integrated into most daily life applications in various fields. The K Nearest Neighbor (KNN), which is a robust Machine Learning algorithm, is traditionally used in classification tasks for its simplicity and training-less nature. Hardware accelerators such as FPGAs and ASICs are greatly needed to meet the increased requirements of performance for these applications. It is well known that ASICs are non-programmable and only fabricated once with high expenses, this makes the fabrication of a complete chip for a specific classification problem inefficient. As a better alternative to this challenge, in this work, a reconfigurable hardware architecture of the KNN algorithm is proposed where the employed dataset, the algorithm parameters, and the distance metric used to evaluate the nearest neighbors are all updatable after fabrication, in the ASIC case, or after programming, in the FPGA case. The architecture is also made flexible to accommodate different memory requirements and allow variable arithmetic type and precision selection. Both parameters can be adjusted before fabrication to account only for the expected memory requirement and the fixed point precision required or floating point arithmetic if needed. The proposed architecture is realized on the Genesys 2 board based on Xilinx’s Kintex-7 FPGA. The results obtained from the experiment are consistent with those obtained from the simulation and software analysis. The proposed realization reaches a frequency of up to around 110 MHz and a power consumption of less than 0.4 watts © 2023 Elsevier GmbH
Software and hardware realizations for different designs of chaos-based secret image sharing systems
Secret image sharing (SIS) conveys a secret image to mutually suspicious receivers by sending meaningless shares to the participants, and all shares must be present to recover the secret. This paper proposes and compares three systems for secret sharing, where a visual cryptography system is designed with a fast recovery scheme as the backbone for all systems. Then, an SIS system is introduced for sharing any type of image, where it improves security using the Lorenz chaotic system as the source of randomness and the generalized Arnold transform as a permutation module. The second SIS system further enhances security and robustness by utilizing SHA-256 and RSA cryptosystem. The presented architectures are implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to enhance computational efficiency and facilitate real-time processing. Detailed experimental results and comparisons between the software and hardware realizations are presented. Security analysis and comparisons with related literature are also introduced with good results, including statistical tests, differential attack measures, robustness tests against noise and crop attacks, key sensitivity tests, and performance analysis. © The Author(s) 2024.