Since ancient times and for hundreds of years, grain mills, hammers, sawmills, spinning mills, and hemp rollers have been powered by water wheels. In the nineteenth century there were hundreds of thousands of mills in all of Europe. It is an enormous historical and cultural heritage of inestimable value, which is for the most part, abandoned today. Recently, there is a renewed interest in their reuse, both for their widespread diffusion in the territory and for the excellent environmental integration and intrinsic sustainability. Even when, for economic reasons, their recovery for the original tasks is not suitable, the conversion into mini plants for the production of electricity can be advantageous. In the paper, analyzing some typical examples of the old water mill of the Piemonte region, in North-West of Italy, the mechanical architecture of old water mill, from water wheels to millstones, is described and the functional details of various mechanisms are provided. In fact, by knowing only the specifics of the ancient mills, it is possible to enhance their potential and restore them from the perspective of a renewed high quality production, or reconvert them in mini-plants for the production of electricity.

One of the most relevant issues in the development of a haptic interface is the choice of the actuators that are devoted to generating the reflection forces. This work has been particularly focused on the employment of the McKibben muscle to this aim. A prototype of one finger has been realized that is intended to be part of a haptic glove, and is based on an articulated mechanism driven by a McKibben muscle. A dynamic model of the finger has been created and validated; then, it has been used to define the control algorithm of the device. Experimental tests highlighted the static and dynamic effectiveness of the device and proved that a McKibben muscle can be appropriately used in such an application.

In this paper is described a new solution for a stair-climbing wheelchair: a device that allows disabled people to autonomously overcome architectural barriers. The paper presents the evolution of a project introduced in previous works. The aim is to obtain a wheelchair able to move both in structured and unstructured environments and overcome single steps or an entire staircase. The innovative aspect of this work is the introduction of a hybrid solution, with a locomotion system based on wheels and an idle track for the vehicle stability. The locomotion group permits to overcome obstacles through an original architecture based on an epicycloidal transmission. The control logic manages the motors that drive independently the two degrees of freedom of the transmission and allows to switch from an advancing mode to a climbing one. The wheelchair must be able to move in different environments, such as flat ground or stairs, which require different specifications, sometimes in contrast. For this reason the main part of the work regards the design of a reconfiguration mechanism able to prepare the wheelchair for different working conditions. First of all the relative positions between the elements that compose the wheelchair structure in different configuration are studied in order to optimize the performances especially in terms of regularity. Then several possible solutions for the reconfiguration mechanism are presented and qualitatively evaluated, in order to choose the one that satisfy the design specifications.

With increasing attention to physical human-machine interaction (pHMI), new control methods involving contact force regulation in collaborative and coexistence scenarios have spread in recent years. Thanks to its internal robustness, high dynamic performance, and capabilities to avoid constraint violations, a Model Predictive Control (MPC) action can pose a viable solution to manage the uncertainties involved in those applications. This paper uses an MPC-driven control method that aims to apply a well-defined and tunable force impulse on a human subject. After describing a general control design suitable to achieve this goal, a practical implementation of such a logic, based on an MPC controller, is shown. In particular, the physical interaction considered is the one occurring between the body of a patient and an external perturbation device in a dynamic posturography trial. The device prototype is presented in both its hardware architecture and software design. The MPC-based main control parameters are thus tuned inside hardware-in-the-loop and human-in-the-loop environments to get optimal behaviors. Finally, the device performance is analyzed to assess the MPC algorithm’s accuracy, repeatability, flexibility, and robustness concerning the several uncertainties due to the specific pHMI environment considered.