Using a walking piezo actuator to drive and control a high precision stage

Piezoelectric actuators are commonly used for micropositioning systems at nanometer resolution. Increasing demands regarding the speed and accuracy are inducing the need for new actuators and new drive principles. A nonresonant piezoelectric actuator is used to drive a stage with 1-DOF through four piezoelectric drive legs. In order to improve the positioning accuracy of the stage, a new drive principle and control strategy for the walking piezomotor are proposed in this paper. The proposed drive principle results in overlapping tip trajectories of the drive legs, resulting in a continuous and smooth drive movement. Gain scheduling feedback in combination with feedforward control further improves the performance of the stage. With the developed drive principle and control strategy, the piezomotor is able to drive the stage at constant velocities between 100 nm/s and 1 $mu$m/s with a tracking error below the encoder resolution of 5 nm. Constant velocities up to 2 mm/s are performed with tracking errors below 400 nm. Point-to-point movements between 5 nm and the complete stroke of the stage are performed with a final static error below the encoder resolutio