Feedback switching control of a walking piezoelectric actuator for trajectory tracking

This paper proposes a feedback switching control (FSC) scheme for a walking piezoelectric actuator (WPA) to track a time-varying trajectory. A WPA has two feet with each foot integrated with a clamp and shear piezoelectric stack actuators (PSAs). The first foot pushes the stage translator a step forward when clamped while the second foot is reset and retracted; subsequently, ‘foot switching’ occurs; as a result, the second foot is clamped to push the translator to make a next step forward and the first foot is reset and retracted. To make sure that the translator is always controlled in closed-loop no matter which foot is clamped, the FSC scheme is proposed. It consists of a clamping waveform generator which converts the trajectory into control signals for the clamp PSAs of the two feet and a feedback controller which provides control signals for the two shear PSAs of the feet. Experimental results show that the proposed control scheme achieves a tracking error of 0.028 µm for a constant velocity trajectory, which is a 75% reduction compared to the 0.113 µm of waveform-based control with iterative learning control compensation in literature.