Force control of piezoelectric walker

This paper is concerned with the force control of a walking piezoelectric motor, a commercially available Piezo LEGS motor. The motor is capable of providing high precision positioning control on nanometer scale, but also relatively high forces up to 6 N. The proposed force control algorithm is very simple, but effective, and it is based on a recently presented coordinate transformation. The transformation allows definition of the driving waveforms for the motor according to a desired motion of the motor legs in the plane of motion. Such a possibility opens a path for creating the y-direction interaction force between the motor legs and the rod which is enough to ensure no relative motion between the legs and the rod. Once that is achieved, one can control the x-direction force imposed by the motor rod on its environment. The presented force control scheme has been successfully validated through a series of experiments.