Development of a bipedal piezoelectric actuator with flexible mechanism based on the frog-leg inspiration

Abstract

A new piezoelectric actuator with flexible mechanism using stick-slip principle based on the frog-leg inspiration is developed in this work. It utilizes bipedal design, and the slider can be driven by only one foot or two feet alternately, which depends on the exciting situation of the used two PZT stacks. The extension of the PZT stack can be transmitted into the vertical and horizontal deformations on two driving feet due to the frog-leg inspiration. They are used to press and actuate the slider. The configuration of this actuator is presented and its working principle is illustrated. Finite element simulation is carried out to investigate the statics performance. A prototype of the proposed actuator is fabricated and series of mechanical output characteristics are measured. The results demonstrated that the proposed actuator obtained the output velocity of 4.23 mm/s when the voltage and frequency were 100 V and 400 Hz. The maximum vertical loading capacity was 9 N under the voltage of 100 V. The corresponding results in this work validated the feasibility of the proposed bipedal piezoelectric actuator with flexible mechanism based on the frog-leg inspiration.