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This article presents the first research into designing an active sensor inspired by electric fish. It is notable for its potential for robotics underwater navigation and exploration tasks in conditions where vision and sonar would meet difficulty. It could also be used as a complementary omnidirectional, short range sense to vision and sonar. Combined with a well defined engine geometry, this sensor can be modeled analytically. In this article, we focus on a particular measurement mode where one electrode of the sensor acts as a current emitter and the others as current receivers. In spite of the high sensitivity required by electric sense, the first results show that we can obtain a detection range of the order of the sensor length, which suggests that this sensor principle can be used for robotics obstacle avoidance as it is illustrated at the end of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents the control of an electropneumatic system used for moving steering mechanism. This aeronautic application needs a high-precision position control and high bandwidth. The structure of the experimental setup and the benchmark on which controllers are evaluated have been designed in order to precisely check the use of such actuator in aeronautics. Two kinds of controllers are designed: a linear one based on gain scheduling feedback, and two high order sliding mode controllers ensuring finite-time convergence, high accuracy and robustness. Experimental results display feasibility and high performance of each controller and a comparison study is done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]