Inspired by a way of rowing, a new piezoelectric driving quadruped micro-robot operating in bending-bending hybrid vibration modes was proposed and tested in this work. The robot consisted of a steel base, four steel connecting pins and four similar driving legs, and all legs were bonded by four piezoelectric ceramic plates. The driving principle is discussed, which is based on the hybrid of first order vertical bending and first order horizontal bending vibrations. The bending-bending hybrid vibration modes motivated the driving foot to form an elliptical trajectory in space. The vibrations of four legs were used to provide the driving forces for robot motion. The proposed robot was fabricated and tested according to driving principle. The vibration characteristics and elliptical movements of the driving feet were simulated by FEM method. Experimental tests of vibration characteristics and mechanical output abilities were carried out. The tested resonance frequencies and vibration amplitudes agreed well with the FEM calculated results. The size of robot is 36 mm × 98 mm × 14 mm, its weight is only 49.8 g, but its maximum load capacity achieves 200 g. Furthermore, the robot can achieve a maximum speed of 33.45 mm/s.

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Micromanipulation robots are powerful tools to explore and reform the microscope world, but it is difficult to integrate high precision, long stroke, strong carrying capability, and multi‐degree of freedom (DOF) motions in a single robot. To address this challenge, herein a bioinspired hexapod piezoelectric robot (PER‐hexapod) aiming at high‐performance micromanipulation is presented. Specifically, two piezoelectric elements are integrated in a functional module to provide 3‐DOF precise motions, the collaboration of six functional modules generates the multi‐DOF motions, and the multimode fusion of three gaits facilitates the cross‐scale motion. The robot outputs 6‐DOF motions with resolutions higher than 4 nm or 0.2 μrad, and unlimited traveling ranges of in‐plane motions are accomplished. PER‐hexapod, whose weight is 0.45 kg, can stably drive a carrying load of 10 kg. In addition, PER‐hexapod realizes the accurate positioning with the root‐mean‐square error less than 5 nm. Thus, it has potential applications in the precise positioning in a large range, such as the batch injection of multiple cells and micromachining on large surfaces. Not only PER‐hexapod, but many other robots can be also designed with the same philosophy to construct micromanipulation systems for various requirements.

A novel U-shaped piezoelectric ultrasonic motor that mainly focused on miniaturization and high power density was proposed, fabricated, and tested in this work. The longitudinal vibrations of the transducers were excited to form the elliptical movements on the driving feet. Finite element method (FEM) was used for design and analysis. The resonance frequencies of the selected vibration modes were tuned to be very close to each other with modal analysis and the movement trajectories of the driving feet were gained with transient simulation. The vibration modes and the mechanical output abilities were tested to evaluate the proposed motor further by a prototype. The maximum output speed was tested to be 416 mm/s, the maximum thrust force was 21 N, and the maximum output power was 5.453 W under frequency of 29.52 kHz and voltage of 100 Vrms. The maximum output power density of the prototype reached 7.59 W/kg, which was even greater than a previous similar motor under the exciting voltage of 200 Vrms. The proposed motor showed great potential for linear driving of large thrust force and high power density.

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