Analysis and cooperative control of a 2-DOF parallel inchworm actuator

In order to meet the higher requirements of today's rapidly developing technology for nano-actuators, such as high speed, high load, high precision, trajectory tracking and multiple degrees of freedom, this paper innovates the traditional inchworm drive principle and proposes a parallel inchworm actuator with two axes moving in concert, and realises the simultaneous control of the two axes through the input signals to realise each single step towards the established direction. The actuator consists of moveable unit and clamping unit, and due to the innovation in the structure of both, only three PZTs are required to realise the control of the inchworm actuator for both axes. In particular, the simultaneous control of different step lengths of the two axes was realised by means of input signals that enabled the realisation of each single step towards the established direction. And verified it with simulation software. Through the drive mode designed in this paper, the parallel drive can realise the coordinated motion of two degrees of freedom, and the drive efficiency is greatly improved, and it is especially suitable for precision guidance and other precision drive and positioning occasions that require trajectory tracking.