New Advances in Mechanisms, Transmissions and Applications

Book Preface

The Second Conference on Mechanisms, Transmissions and Applications, MeTrApp 2013, has been organized by the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of the Basque Country, and has been held in the Bizkaia Aretoa building in the city of Bilbao, Spain, during the period 2–4 October 2013. This conference constitutes the consolidation of the new born MeTrApp conference, which was held for the first time in Timisoara.

The International Federation for the Promotion of the Mechanism and Machine Science, IFToMM, has several technical committees, two of them being the Technical Committee on Linkages and Mechanical Controls and the Technical Committee on Micromachines. One of the main efforts of these two committees is directed to promoting the interaction among university professors and researchers, engineers that work in industry and postgraduate students, with the purpose of testing hypothesis and sharing knowledge in the field of Machine Theory. In this sense, this Conference constitutes the most suitable atmosphere to achieve this target.

The contents of this conference are brought together in this book formed by a collection of 50 peer-reviewed papers, dealing with important and up-todate topics in the field of mechanisms and robotics. The main areas covered in this conference are mechanism and machine design, mechanical transmissions, automotive applications, biomechanical applications, parallel mechanisms, walking mechanisms, and computational and experimental methods.

A significant number of authors have contributed to the success of this conference. The research papers included in this book are a compilation of relevant results developed by active research groups from many universities and institutions all over the world such as: Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, France, Poland, Romania, Russia, Turkey, and Spain.