No abstract

Snake-like robots exhibited more advantages than conventional mobile robots on environment adaptation. They almost can move in most ill conditions including rough terrain, desert, water, cave and tree. In this paper, a 3D snake-like robot called Perambulator-II (Shenyang Institute of Automation Snake-like robot II) is developed with the acquirement of powerful propulsion and high mobility. The unit of snake-like robot Perambulator-II robot named as Modular Universal Unit (MUU) is introduced, which behaves three DOFs with a series of passive rollers around its cylinder body. Also, some considerations on mechanism design of snake-like robots are presented. And the shell shape of 3D snake-like robot according to mobility is discussed in detail. The locomotion of Perambulator-II is presented for test its performance. The experimental results are given to validate the mobility of the snake-like robot Perambulator-II.

As an energy-saving strategy, well-crystallized CuO hierarchical structures are synthesized by hydrothermal method and applied in Li-ion batteries without calcination.

This paper reports a simple and environmentally friendly approach for the synthesis of rutile TiO 2 mesocrystals (RTM) composed of single crystal aggregated nanorod clusters. It is a hydrothermal method involving titanium(III) chloride as the only reactant. The resulting one-dimensional rutile nanorods can easily assemble into three-dimensional hierarchical architectures without any surfactants or additives. By selecting appropriate experimental conditions, such as reaction time and ripening temperature, we can easily manipulate the RTM microstructure. Detailed experiments suggest that the growth of the RTM is spontaneous and an extremely rapid self-reaction of titanium(III) chloride, which is controlled by the thermodynamics process. Furthermore, the composites photoanode was fabricated by hybridizing RTM and TiO 2 nanoparticles (Degussa-P25 powder) for use in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The composite photoanode-based DSSC possesses superior performance to TiO 2 nanoparticle cells. A high light-to-electricity conversion yield of 7.3% for composite photoanodes was achieved, significantly higher than that of TiO 2 nanoparticle photoanodes with a similar thickness (5.45%). This result can be attributed to their synergistic effect of high crystallinity, light scattering and fast charge transfer capability.

High aspect ratio CuO submicron rods were synthesized via the polymer-assisted oriented attachment of nanocrystal building blocks along with calcination.