DESIGN AND EXPERIMENT OF A RESONANT PIEZOELECTRIC CRAWLING ROBOT

Micro robots have become a key research direction in the development of intelligent robot technology in recent years. Based on their advantages such as small size, high sensitivity, and flexible movement, they can be applied in many fields such as disaster rescue search, extreme environment detection, and medical surgery. Piezoelectric ceramic is a kind of intelligent material that can convert mechanical and electrical energy into each other. By combining piezoelectric ceramic with crawling robots, a crawling robot with integrated patch-typed piezoelectric drive and execution structure can be designed. Such design not only reduces the size of the mechanism, improves transmission efficiency, but also makes the robot's motion more stable and reliable. Therefore, for tasks in complex environments, various new structures of piezoelectric crawling robots designed using the inverse piezoelectric effect, friction drive, and stick-slip motion principle have very broad research prospects and practical value. This paper designs an integrated quadruped crawling robot driven by dual piezoelectric plates based on the inverse piezoelectric effect, and designs several driven feet with different friction forces. The theoretical mechanic methods are used to establish the overall force equation of a unit body of the robot, and the vibration mechanics is used to derive its dynamic model. A quadruped piezoelectric robot is designed and manufactured, and we have experimentally tested the effects of different driving frequencies, loads, voltages, and driving feet on the motion direction and speed of a single unit segment of the robot. We also investigated the effects of different contact surfaces and voltage and frequency signals on the motion direction and speed of the quadruped crawling robot. Finally, the semi-physical simulation platform Quancer board is connected through the simulation software, and the quadruped crawling robot is controlled by driving voltages of different frequencies and amplitudes to achieve left turn, right turn, rotation around the center of the circle, and approximate linear motion without a guide rail.