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Piezoelectric motors are used in many industrial and commercial applications. Various piezoelectric motors are available in the market. All of the piezoelectric motors use the inverse piezoelectric effect, where microscopically small oscillatory motions are converted into continuous or stepping rotary or linear motions. Methods of obtaining long moving distance have various drive and functional principles that make these motors categorized into three groups: resonance-drive (piezoelectric ultrasonic motors), inertia-drive, and piezo-walk-drive. In this review, a comprehensive summary of piezoelectric motors, with their classification from initial idea to recent progress, is presented. This review also includes some of the industrial and commercial applications of piezoelectric motors that are presently available in the market as actuators.

This paper reviews recent developments of micro ultrasonic rotary motors using piezoelectric resonant vibrations. Following the historical background, four ultrasonic motors recently developed at Penn State University are introduced; windmill, PZT tube, metal tube, and shear-type motors. Driving principles and motor characteristics are described in comparison with the conventional ultrasonic motors. Motors with 1.5 mm in diameter and 0.8 mN·m in torque have been actually developed.

Recently, various multimedia devices such as MP3 player, camera and even TV are integrated into a mobile phone. Consumer demands image cameras in mobile phone to have similar quality and performance as those of dedicated digital cameras. For a good image quality, increasing of resolution requires optical auto focusing, where a small lens group needs to be moved in a limited volume. Due to the efforts for reducing the size of each component in mobile phone, many types of motors have been investigated to achieve AF or zooming functions. However, a motor should be able to provide high controllability and performance to perform auto-focus (AF) camera function. One of the important features that piezoelectric motors have is the ability to maintain moving element position when the motor is not electrically excited. For mobile device application where power consumption is critical, this feature is fitting very well for lens positioning application in phone cameras. In this paper, we have applied our own development of piezoelectric motor for auto focus phone cameras. During auto focusing, we have measured total motor operating time that is less than one percent of total auto focusing time. Average instantaneous power, which is about 65 mWatts, is consumed only when the motor operates, which make piezoelectric motors to be superior over electromagnetic counterparts in terms of energy efficiency.