A camera positioner driven by muscle-like actuation

Numerous camera positioning mechanisms exist, but their actuation has little in common with the human eye whose motion they are meant to replicate. Piezoelectric cellular actuators, a novel biologically inspired technology, have much more in common with the recti muscles that position the human eye than traditional actuators have. This work explains how to select multi-layer nested compliant strain amplification mechanisms that can scale up the displacement of piezoelectric stacks to the range of the ocular positioning system. The resulting actuators are deployed on a working single degree-of-freedom device.