Hysteresis and vibration compensation in a nonlinear unimorph piezocantilever

Due to their rapidity and their high resolution, piezoelectric materials are very prized in microactuators and microrobotics. The classical example is the piezocantilevers. Notwithstanding, piezoecantilevers present nonlinearities (hysteresis and creep) when the applied electric field becomes large. On the other hand, they present lightly damped vibration. Feedback control is a classical issue to eliminate this unwanted behavior but it involves the use of sensors. In micromanipulation and in microassembly, sensors still remain one of the problematic because of their sizes and difficulty of packaging. This paper presents the feedforward compensation of the hysteresis and the vibrations in piezocantilevers. While the Prandtl-Ishlinskii (PI) static hysteresis model is used to compute the hysteresis compensator, we employ the Input-Shaping method to reject the unwanted vibration. The experiments show that the accuracy can be highly increased while the setling time ameliorated and the vibration largely decreased.