Rotary ultrasonic motors actuated by traveling flexural waves

Efficient miniature actuators that are compact and consume low power are needed to drive telerobotic devices and space mechanisms in future NASA missions. Ultrasonic rotary motors have the potential to meet this NASA need and they are developed as actuators for miniature telerobotic applications. The technology that has emerged in commercial products requires rigorous analytical tools for effective design of such motors. A fmite element analytical model was developed to examine the excitation of flexural plate wave traveling in a rotary piezoelectrically actuated motor. The model uses annular fmite elements that are applied to predict the excitation frequency and modal response of an annular stator. This model is being developed to enable the design of efficient ultrasonic motors (USMs) and it incorporates the details of the stator which include the teeth, piezoelectric crystals, stator geometry, etc. The theoretical predictions were corroborated experimentally for the stator. Parallel to this effort, USMs are made and incorporated into a robotic arm and their capability to operate at the environment of Mars is being studied. Motors with two different actuators layout were tested at cryovac conditions and were shown to operate down to -150°C and l6-mTorr when the activation starts at ambient conditions.