An Open-Loop Method for Point-to-Point Positioning of a Piezoelectric Actuator

We describe how to control a piezoelectric actuator using the open-loop method for point-to-point positioning. Since piezoelectric actuators have nonlinear characteristics due to hysteresis and creep between the input voltage and the resulting displacement, a special method is required to eliminate this nonlinearity for an open-loop drive. We have introduced open-loop driving methods for piezoelectric actuators in the past, which required a large input voltage and an initializing motion sequence to reset the state of the actuator before each movement. In this paper, we propose a new driving method that uses the initializing state. This method also utilizes the overshoot from both the upward and downward stepwise drives. Applying this method, we obtained precise point-to-point positioning without the influence of hysteresis and creep.