Control strategies for an inchworm piezomotor

This paper describes two control methodologies developed for an inchworm type precision piezomotor. The paper presents a motor designed based on the classical inchworm principle. A hybrid control method that consists of a traditional PID controller and a rule-based scheme is developed and it is shown to offer good performance based on simulating the computer model of the inchworm motor. A neural network based controller is also presented and is shown to reduce the hardware complexity of the overall system and to lead to excellent tracking performance.