Nanowires and nanotubes of diverse material compositions, properties and/or functions have been produced or fabricated through various bottom-up or top-down approaches. These nanowires or nanotubes have also been utilized as potential building blocks for functional nanodevices. The key for the integration of those nanowire or nanotube based devices is to assemble these one dimensional nanomaterials to specific locations using techniques that are highly controllable and scalable. Ideally such techniques should enable assembly of highly uniform nanowire/nanotube arrays with precise control of density, location, dimension or even material type of nanowire/nanotube. Numerous assembly techniques are being developed that can quickly align and assemble large quantities of one type or multiple types of nanowires through parallel processes, including flow-assisted alignment, Langmuir-Blodgett assembly, bubble-blown technique, electric/magnetic- field directed assembly, contact/roll printing, knocking-down, etc.. With these assembling techniques, applications of nanowire/nanotube based devices such as flexible electronics and sensors have been demonstrated. This paper delivers an overall review of directed nanowire assembling approaches and analyzes advantages and limitations of each method. The future research directions have also been discussed.

A transparent, conductive, smooth, and temperature sensitive thin films was fabricated and characterized in this paper. Silk fibroin could be processed into transparent thin films, which can act as ideal opto-electronic substrates. As pure silk fibroin film is nonconductive, ultra-long silver nanowires coating and platinum sputtering were used to strengthen its conductivity. Ultra-long nanowires were used to reduce the junctions between wires, and platinum was to improve the conductivity of the film. The new nanowire-metal-organic composite film possesses excellent conductivity and good transmittance. The composite films containing different silver nanowires exhibit conductivities of as low as 6.9 Ω/sq, and transmittance of 60–80% in the visible light range. The films also showed potentials in practical applications as their resistance is almost linearly temperature-dependent. It also can transfer power to electrical devices. The new composite films could be expected to function in wearable electronics or implantable devices and sensors.

Remote center of motion (RCM) has become a rising research direction in the field of robotics. It means that a robot with a rod-shaped end-effector operates through a tiny hole on the surface. Thereinto, a key issue is the deviation of the RCM point's position, apart from the operating accuracy. In addition, considering that an RCM robotic system generally consists of a commercial robot and a specialized rod-shaped end-effector, there exist some errors in the structural information related to the attached end-effector. In this article, a remote center of cyclic motion scheme with a data-driven technology is proposed to control robots, of which end-effectors' structural parameters are inaccurate. Meanwhile, a recurrent neural network is proposed to figure out the scheme's solution, with the relevant theoretical analysis given. Furthermore, simulative and physical experiments on a FRANKA Panda robot with a rod-shaped end-effector are conducted to validate the control scheme's effectiveness distinctly.

A portable capacitive sensor was designed to assess frying oil degradation by measuring the changes in electrical capacitance. An interdigital electrode (IDE) was designed to be implemented as the testing probe (as IDEs are resistive to parasitic capacitance), together with an adjacent capacitive chip Pcap01 and a further microprocessor STM32, which were used as the data-processing elements. Experimental results demonstrated that viscosity could be a useful frying oil quality indicator, and also proved a preliminary correlation between IDE capacitance and oils’ total polar materials. This implies that IDE capacitance could be a suitable metric for conveniently assessing frying oil degradation. The designed capacitance sensor is light in weight, cost effective, and has excellent potential for simple, inexpensive, on-the-spot testing of the current quality of frying oil.