More articles by Todd Zalud

There are tricks of the trade when it comes to getting an accurate measure of temperature.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) imagines an army of remote-controlled insect-cyborg scouts.

Replacing a pneumatic actuator with an intelligent lead-screw system let a company that makes shrink-bundling machinery avoid difficulties when changing product lines.

Environmental, cost, and safety issues are making leak-free hydraulics critical.

Conventional fluid-power laws often cannot adequately model hydraulic systems. They need a method that simultaneously solves for all parameters in the system.

Methods for sizing motors, selecting drives and controllers, and using design rules for reducing cogging torque, help motion control engineers build more accurate, efficient, and reliable systems.

There's more than one way to get high positional accuracy, minimal backlash, and high reduction rations in small packages.

I remember driving my parents '73 Caddy in the snow and having a pretty good time fishtailing around corners and doing donuts in empty parking lots.

Air bearings for linear applications, segmented bearings that can be installed into hard-to-reach places, and thermoplastic bearings molded with integral pulleys or gear teeth are just a few of the recent developments from bearing manufacturers.

Traditional profile monorails deliver the highest accuracy for linear motion.