Mark Nagurka

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Marquette University

This paper describes a key component of an onboard power generation system that converts mechanical vibrations into electrical power to support a train’s electronically controlled pneumatic brake system. The translational generator acquires its energy from naturally occurring rail car displacements during normal train operation. The generator uses...

Artificial muscles traditionally rely on pneumatic sources of fluid power. Use of hydraulics can increase the power and force to weight and volume ratios of artificial muscle actuators. This paper develops a control-centric third-order single-input-single-output lumped-parameter dynamic model and sliding mode position controller based on Filippov's...

The high force-to-weight ratios of braided fluidic artificial muscles are ideal for human scale and mobile robot applications. Prior modeling efforts focus on the theoretical static characteristics or empirical dynamic models of these actuators when pressurized. This paper develops a comprehensive high fidelity theoretical dynamic model based on fi...

Pneumatic double acting cylinders are able to provide inherent stiffness and force control for compliant motion control applications. Impedance control methods allow for a broad spectrum of mechanical properties of actuators to be achieved. The range of this spectrum can be increased by simultaneously controlling the actuator’s inherent stiffness a...

Fluidic braided artificial muscles have been studied for close to seventy years. Their high power-to-weight ratio and force-to-weight ratio make them a desirable actuation technology for compact and lightweight mobile manipulation. Use of hydraulics with fluidic artificial muscles has helped realize high actuation forces with new potential applicat...

Due to their high power density, hydraulic systems are increasingly adapted for human scale devices. For example, commercial and utility electricians use electrohydraulic cutting and crimping tools, rather than human powered tools, to cut and crimp wires that exceed 25mm in diameter. These tools greatly reduce worker-related fatigue and strain-type...

Pneumatic double acting cylinders are able to provide inherent stiffness and force control for compliant motion control applications. Impedance control methods allow for a broad spectrum of mechanical properties of actuators to be achieved. The range of this spectrum can be increased by simultaneously controlling the actuator's inherent stiffness a...

Hydraulic artificial muscles offer unrivaled specific power and power density and are instrumental to the improved performance and success of soft robotics and lightweight mobile applications. This paper addresses the lack of model-based impedance control approaches for soft actuators such as hydraulic artificial muscles. Impedance control of actua...

Overhead line workers have anecdotally reported elevated levels of fatigue in forearm muscles when operating the pistol grip control that maneuvers an aerial bucket on a utility truck. Previous research with surface electromyographic (sEMG) recordings of forearm muscles corroborated these reports of muscle fatigue. A new pistol grip was designed th...

A nonlinear lumped-parameter state-space model of a pneumatic artificial muscle that accounts for kinetic friction is developed. Model simulations are reported for square-wave command signals at different frequencies. Comparisons to experimental results demonstrate the fidelity of the model. A new sliding mode control tuning parameter is introduced...

This paper presents a modified integral sliding surface, sliding mode control law for pneumatic artificial muscles. The cutoff frequency tuning parameter λ is squared to increase the gradient from absement (integral of position) to position and higher derivatives to reflect the more dominant terms in the actuator dynamics. The sliding mode controll...

Electric utility line workers report high levels of fatigue in forearm muscles when operating a conventional pistol grip control in aerial buckets. This study measured the applied force and surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals from four upper extremity muscles required to operate the pistol grip control in two tasks. The first task was movement...

Mechanical Vibration: Analysis, Uncertainties, and Control, Fourth Edition addresses the principles and application of vibration theory. Equations for modeling vibrating systems are explained, and MATLAB® is referenced as an analysis tool. The Fourth Edition adds more coverage of damping, new case studies, and development of the control aspects in...

By incorporating force transducers into treadmills, force platform-instrumented treadmills (commonly called force treadmills) can collect large amounts of gait data and enable the ground reaction force (GRF) to be calculated. However, the high cost of force treadmills has limited their adoption. This paper proposes a low-cost force treadmill system...

Sleep stage scoring is generally determined in a polysomnographic (PSG) study where technologists use electroencephalogram (EEG), electromyogram (EMG), and electrooculogram (EOG) signals to determine the sleep stages. Such a process is time consuming and labor intensive. To reduce the workload and to improve the sleep stage scoring performance of s...

Background Many methods have been proposed to assess the stability of human postural balance by using a force plate. While most of these approaches characterize postural stability by extracting features from the trajectory of the center of pressure (COP), this work develops stability measures derived from components of the ground reaction force (GR...

Machine Design Experiments Using Gears to Foster Discovery Learning for the typical undergraduate engineering student the topic of gears is introduced and discussed in several courses. Early exposure may be in a physics course or in a first dynamics course,where gear pairs are presented as an idealized means to change speed ratios and torque ratios...

Background In addition to the cost and complexity of processing multiple signal channels, manual sleep staging is also tedious, time consuming, and error-prone. The aim of this paper is to propose an automatic slow wave sleep (SWS) detection method that uses only one channel of the electroencephalography (EEG) signal. New Method The proposed approa...

Advancements in fastener technology have been complemented by the development of new types of screwdriver bits. While designs may vary, so may the force application requirements placed on the tool user. The primary objective of this experiment was to analyze the relationship between user applied torque and screwdriver bit design. A further objectiv...

There is a need for increased opportunities for effective neurorehabilitation services for stroke survivors outside the hospital environment. Efforts to develop low-cost robot/computer therapy solutions able to be deployed in home and community rehabilitation settings have been growing. Our long-term goal is to develop a very low-cost system for st...

The study describes the design and development of a single degree-of-freedom haptic robot, Haptic Theradrive, for post-stroke arm rehabilitation for in-home and clinical use. The robot overcomes many of the weaknesses of its predecessor, the TheraDrive system, that used a Logitech steering wheel as the haptic interface for rehabilitation. Although...

This paper describes new experiments that were designed to provide engineering students with opportunities for discovery learning experiences with systems using mechanical springs. A suite of practical experiments was developed presenting students with a range of challenges requiring them to analyze, measure, and design springs. Activities in the e...

At Marquette University, hybrid project-based learning has been implemented in an undergraduate mechanical engineering course on materials processing and forming using a team-based approach. The goals of the project are to 1) introduce more active and student-centered activities to improve student engagement and mastery of core concepts, 2) increas...

This paper describes a pilot study to evaluate Freehand Sketching for Engineers, a one credit, five week course taught to undergraduate engineering students. The short-term goal of this course was to improve engineering students' freehand sketching ability and to assess their progress with metrics. The long-term objective (desired learning outcome)...

This paper summarizes the results of our investigation into the feasibility of increasing the level of discovery learning in the College of Engineering (COE) at Marquette University. We review the education literature, document examples of discovery learning currently practiced in the COE and other schools, and propose a Marquette COE-specific defi...

A magnetic levitation (maglev) system is inherently nonlinear and open-loop unstable because of the nature of magnetic force. Most controllers for maglev systems are designed based on a nominal linearized model. System variations and uncertainties are not accommodated. The controllers are generally designed to satisfy gain and phase margin specific...

TheraDrive is an effective system for post-stroke upper extremity rehabilitation. This system uses off-the-shelf computer gaming wheels with force feedback to help reduce motor impairment and improve function in the arms of stroke survivors. Preliminary results show that the TheraDrive system lacks a robust mechanical linkage that can withstand the...

The objective of this work is to demonstrate the use of acceleration feedback to improve the performance of a maglev system, especially in disturbance attenuation. In the single degree-of-freedom (DOF) system studied here, acceleration feedback has the effect of virtually increasing inertia, damping and stiffness. It is shown that it can be used to...

Abstract - Undergraduate engineering education today is ineffective in preparing students for multidisciplinary system integration and optimization - exactly what is needed by companies to become innovative and gain a competitive advantage in this global economy. While there is some movement in engineering education to change that, this change is n...

A cascaded feedback control strategy for an industrial vapour-phase axial deposition (VAD) process is investigated in this paper. VAD is a widely used process in the creation of high-purity glass for optical fibre. In previous work a soot tip surface temperature controller was developed for the VAD process to reduce the effects of core soot tempera...

In solving pattern recognition problems, many ensemble methods have been proposed to replace a single classifier by a classifier committee. These methods can be divided roughly into two categories: serial and parallel approaches. In the serial approach, component classifiers are created by focusing on different parts of the training set in differen...

Several previous studies have investigated the gender difference of the fingerprint features. However, regarding to the statistical significance of such differences, inconsistent results have been obtained. To resolve this problem and to develop a method for gender determination, this work proposes and tests three fingertip features for gender dete...

Many computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods, including 2D and 3D approaches, have been proposed for solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs). However, the detection and diagnosis of SPNs remain challenging in many clinical circumstances. One goal of this work is to investigate the relative diagnostic accuracy of 2D and 3D methods. An additional goal is to...

Early detection and intervention strategies for schizophrenia are receiving increasingly more attention. Dermatoglyphic patterns, such as the degree of asymmetry of the fingerprints, have been hypothesized to be indirect measures for early abnormal developmental processes that can lead to later psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. However,...

Optical fiber for data communication is manufactured by the draw process, which involves heating and pulling high purity glass cylinders to diameters of 125 μm. The diameter of the glass fiber and its light-guide core must remain constant to create a product capable of transmitting high-bandwidth optical data. The draw capstan design has a signific...

Using dynamic programming, this work develops a one-class-at-a-time removal sequence planning method to decompose a multiclass classification problem into a series of two-class problems. Compared with previous decomposition methods, the approach has the following distinct features. First, under the one-class-at-a-time framework, the approach guaran...

This study aimed to compare and analyse rubber-dome desktop, spring-column desktop and notebook keyboards in terms of key stiffness and fingertip typing force. The spring-column keyboard resulted in the highest mean peak contact force (0.86N), followed by the rubber dome desktop (0.68N) and the notebook (0.59N). All these differences were statistic...

An optimization approach applied to mechanical linkage models is used to simulate human arm movements. Predicted arm trajectories are the result of minimizing a nonlinear performance index that depends on kinematic or dynamic variables of the movement. A robust optimization algorithm is presented that computes trajectories which satisfy the necessa...

The development of a cascaded feedback control strategy for a vapor-phase axial deposition (VAD) process is investigated in this paper. VAD is a widely used process in the creation of high purity glass for optical fiber. In previous work a soot tip surface temperature controller was developed for the VAD process to reduce the effects of core soot t...

This paper presents a robust noniterative algorithm for the design of controllers of a given structure satisfying frequency-dependent sensitivity specifications. The method is well suited for automatic loop shaping, particularly in the context of Quantitative Feed-back Theory (QFT), and offers several advantages, including (i) it can be applied to...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1983. MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING Includes bibliographical references. by Mark L. Nagurka. Ph.D.

In solving pattern recognition problems, many classification methods, such as the nearest-neighbor (NN) rule, need to determine prototypes from a training set. To improve the performance of these classifiers in finding an efficient set of prototypes, this paper introduces a training sample sequence planning method. In particular, by estimating the...

This paper investigates the control of a low cost vertical-axis maglev system for mechatronics and controls education. The tabletop maglev system consists of an electromagnetic coil that levitates a ferrous object using an infrared sensor to determine the object’s position. Based on the sensor output, the controller adjusts the coil current, thus c...

This paper presents performance limitations and a control design methodology for nonminimum phase plants of the pure delay type subject to robustness constraints. Of interest is the design of a set of controllers, for which the open-loop transfer function is a proportional-integral (PI) controller plus delay, meeting con-straints on the magnitude o...

The paper presents a robust non-iterative algorithm for designing low order controllers satisfying frequency-dependent sensitivity specifications. The method is well suited for automatic loop shaping, particularly of QFT (quantitative feedback theory) problems.

This paper proposes a nearest neighbor classifier design method based on vector quantization (VQ). By investigating the error distribution pattern of the training set, the VQ technique is applied to generate prototypes incrementally until the desired classification result is reached. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.

Abstract Controlling false acceptance errors is of critical importance in many pattern recognition ap- plications, including signature and speaker veri$cation problems. Toward this goal, this paper presents two post-processing methods to improve the performance of hyperspherical classi$ers in rejecting patterns from unknown classes. The $rst method...

This paper presents a method for the design of PID-type controllers, including those augmented by a filter on the D element, satisfying a required gain margin and an upper bound on the (complementary) sensitivity for a finite set of plants. Important properties of the method are: (i) it can be applied to plants of any order including non-minimum ph...

This paper discusses our common experiences teaching two similar mechatronics courses as senior-level electives offered in departments of mechanical and industrial engineer- ing. Both courses foster an integrated, multidisciplinary, systems-level approach for the design of a physical device or system process, in contrast to the sequential applicati...

The set of all stabilizing controllers of a given low order structure that guarantee specifications on the gain margin, phase margin and a bound on the sensitivity corresponds to a region in n-dimensional space defined by the coefficients of the controllers. For several practical criteria defined in the paper it is shown that the optimal controller...

The mechanical properties of a vertically dropped ball, represented by an equivalent mass-spring-damper model, are related to the coefficient of restitution and the time of contact of the ball during one bounce with the impacting surface. In addition, it is shown that the coefficient of restitution and contact time of a single bounce are related to...

This paper presents a control design method for determining proportional-integral-type controllers satisfying specifications on gain margin, phase margin, and an upper bound on the (complementary) sensitivity for a finite set of plants. The approach can be applied to plants that are stable or unstable, plants given by a model or measured data, and...

This paper presents a control design algorithm for determining PI-type controllers satisfying specifications on gain margin, phase margin, and an upper bound on the (complementary) sensitivity for a finite set of plants. Important properties of the algorithm are: (i) it can be applied to plants of any order including plants with delay, unstable pla...

This paper proposes a method for the design of predictive controllers for nonlinear systems, The method consists of two phases, a solution phase and a learning phase. In the solution phase, dynamic programming is applied to obtain a closed-loop control law. In the learning phase, neural networks are used to simulate the control law. This phase over...

This paper addresses aerodynamic modeling issues related to a simple experiment in which a ping-pong ball is dropped from rest onto a table surface. From the times between the ball-table impacts, the initial drop height and the coefficient of restitution can be determined using a model that neglects aerodynamic drag. The experiment prompts question...

A simple experiment, well suited for an undergraduate course in mechatronics, is described in which thermal time-constant information is extracted from a heater-blower table-top system. In the experiment, a thermistor measures the temperature of a resistive-heater that is cooled by a blower and a microcontroller is used for data acquisition. The st...

An experiment is conducted in which a free-standing bicycle wheel is given an initial angular speed and then allowed to slow down to rest. Measurements of the wheel speed, using a mag- netic sensor, during the decay are compared to predictions from a model accounting for a combination of viscous and dry friction at the wheel bearing. The time histo...

In comparison to PI and PID controllers, a higher order “advanced” controller is shown to improve the performance of an experimental robot for speed and position control applications. The advanced controller attains a higher bandwidth, lower settling time and better disturbance rejection, while the increased performance costs little in sensor noise...

This paper describes a simple experiment well suited for an undergraduate course in me-chanical measurements and/or dynamics, in which physical information is extracted from an acoustic emission signature. In the experiment, a ping±pong ball is dropped onto a hard table surface and the audio signal resulting from the ball±table impacts is recorded....

The success of high-speed rail systems in Europe and Japan has led to the consideration of deployment of such systems in the United States. Since operating conditions in the United States are different from those in Europe and Japan, questions arise as to the safety-related behaviour of such systems. To address questions of dynamic behaviour, linea...

The tactile feel of a computer key is the composite of static and dynamic components, which include stiffness and damping. A computer-controlled test rig that can measure computer key displacement, velocity, and contact force was designed and constructed and used for testing of computer keys. The hypothesis of this study is that mechanical damping...

Presents a unified approach to obtain simultaneously the continuous-time and discrete-time state space solutions for the composite state feedback control of singularly perturbed H_∞ systems. First, the scaled frequency domain realizations of dynamic systems are developed and then used to generate the unified H _∞ solutions that...

This paper introduces a fast starting motion control method for servo systems. The method consists of two phases. In the first phase, a time-optimal controller is used to accelerate the servo system. The second phase adopts a neural network based approach for speed regulation. It also achieves robustness to payload variation by estimating the paylo...

Describes the development of a special-purpose test rig for the measurement of stiffness and damping characteristics of computer keyboard keys. The ultimate aim of this project is to gain a more complete understanding of the tactile “feel” of computer keyboard keys by quantifying their mechanical impedance. To achieve this goal, a computer-controll...

The aim of this project is to gain a more complete understanding of the tactile "feel" of computer key-board keys by quantifying their mechanical impedance. To achieve this goal, a computer-controlled test rig that can measure computer key displacement, velocity, and contact force has been designed, constructed and tested. This paper describes the...

Part I of this paper presents a dynamic model of magnetically-levitated (maglev) vehicle/guideway interaction. The vehicle employs a superconducting electromagnetic suspension system with canted magnets to provide simultaneous levitation and guidance in the face of guideway irregularities and cross-wind gusts. The dynamic simulation model includes...

Part II of this paper proposes the use of optimal preview control with integral action for a maglev vehicle with a superconducting electromagnetic suspension system operating on an elevated, flexible guideway. The control system is designed based on a linearized model and then applied to a full-scale nonlinear simulation model of the maglev vehicle...

Computer simulation studies are a useful means to investigate the safety and performance of a high-speed magnetically levitated (maglev) vehicle negotiating an elevated guideway. These studies confirm the importance of accounting for the dynamic interaction that couples the vehicle and guideway. The vehicle and guideway systems are driven by the sa...

In this paper, we present a geometric method for representing the classical root sensitivity function of linear time-invariant dynamic systems. The method employs specialized eigenvalue plots that expand the information presented in the root locus plot in a manner that permits determination by inspection of both the real and imaginary components of...

This paper develops a geometric perspective that ties together a number of graphically based techniques from classical control theory. In particular, in the frequency domain, a connection between the Nyquist diagram and the Bode plots is unfolded via a sequence of three-dimensional representations. A parallel development in the “gain-domain” begins...