Adaptive Control of Piezoelectric Walker Actuator

This work focuses on the design of adaptive controller for high precision positioning purposes using PiezoLegs actuator. Actuator is driven with the set of periodical sine shaped voltages with known frequency, amplitude and phase shift between the phases. Clear relationships between the amplitude and phase shifts between the phases and actuator step size have been established. Based on these relationships adaptive controller has been designed. Controller is a linear, cascaded type of feedback controller that uses position feedback from an encoder. Based on the information of the absolute error controller performs the adaptive step size modulation by changing amplitude or phase shift of the driving voltages. Proposed algorithm is validated experimentally. Experimental results show satisfactory level performance, controller achieves fast settling time, no overshoot response and high accuracy of positioning with small steady state errors.