Design and Additive Manufacture of a High-speed Piezoelectrically Actuated Compliant Mesoscale Parallel Robot

This work presents the design of an additively manufactured mesoscale parallel robot that is actuated by piezoelectric bimorphs through a compliant transmission mechanism. The piezoelectric bimorph actuators are modeled via finite element and experimentally tested to verify their performance. A transmission mechanism is designed using finite element analysis to determine the critical parameters for the conversion of the piezoelectric actuators small linear displacements to large rotational motion. Multiple transmissions are fabricated using additive manufacturing and are tested experimentally. The transmission mechanism is then used to create a six-bar parallel robot that is driven by the piezoelectric bimorphs, which is simulated and tested experimentally. The planar parallel robot is 37.88 by 20.54 millimeters in size and has a workspace of 14.36 by 8.66 millimeters for a total area of 65.6 millimeters squared. The robot is capable of following trajectories within the workspace at a frequency of up to 10 Hz.