Design of Multi-DOF Spherical Piezoelectric Motor Using Electrode Configuration Based Actuating Units

Abstract Spherical piezoelectric motors (SPMs) apply piezoelectric materials as stators to generate modal responses for rotor orientation. The SPMs have the advantages of simple structure and compact size but may suffer from the difficulty of orientation manipulation. This paper presents a novel electrode configuration based SPM design for simple multi degree-of-freedom (DOF) orientation manipulation. Four piezoelectric actuating units are adopted as stators to generate 12 orientations through the integration and switch of two vibration modes of each piezoelectric actuator, including lateral mode and longitudinal mode. The dynamic characteristics associated with the design parameters at each vibration mode are experimentally obtained to evaluate the performance of the proposed SPM design.