Piezoelectric micromotors for microrobots
Abstract
Mobile robots are able to carry more and more intelligence (and in smaller packages) onboard everyday. Now we would like to match the brawn of our robots to the same scale as the brain. Towards this end, we have fabricated some small, a few millimeters in diameter, piezoelectric motors using ferroelectric thin films. These motors consist of two pieces: a stator and a rotor. The stationary stator includes a piezoelectric film in which we induce bending in the form of a traveling wave. Anything which sits atop the stator is propelled by the wave. A small glass lens placed upon the stator becomes the spinning rotor. Piezoelectric micromotors overcome the problems currently associated with electrostatic micromotors such as low torque, friction, and the need for high voltage excitation.
- Publication:
-
Massachusetts Inst. of Tech. Report
- Pub Date:
- February 1991
- Bibcode:
- 1991mit..reptR....F
- Keywords:
-
- Artificial Intelligence;
- Micromotors;
- Piezoelectricity;
- Robot Dynamics;
- Robotics;
- Robots;
- Ferroelectricity;
- Glass;
- Lenses;
- Rotors;
- Stators;
- Thin Films;
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering