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Characterization and Design of A Hollow Cylindrical Ultrasonic Motor

Zhao, Zhanyue, Wang, Yang, Bales, Charles, Ruiz-Cadalso, Daniel, Zheng, Howard, Furlong-Vazquez, Cosme, Fischer, Gregory

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Piezoelectric ultrasonic motors perform the advantages of compact design, faster reaction time, and simpler setup compared to other motion units such as pneumatic and hydraulic motors, especially its non-ferromagnetic property makes it a perfect match in MRI-compatible robotics systems compared to traditional DC motors. Hollow shaft motors address the advantages of being lightweight and comparable to solid shafts of the same diameter, low rotational inertia, high tolerance to rotational imbalance due to low weight, and tolerance to high temperature due to low specific mass. This article presents a prototype of a hollow cylindrical ultrasonic motor (HCM) to perform direct drive, eliminate mechanical non-linearity, and reduce the size and complexity of the actuator or end effector assembly. Two equivalent HCMs are presented in this work, and under 50g prepressure on the rotor, it performed 383.3333rpm rotation speed and 57.3504mNm torque output when applying 282$V_{pp}$ driving voltage.


Design and Characterization of MRI-compatible Plastic Ultrasonic Motor

Zhao, Zhanyue, Bales, Charles, Fischer, Gregory

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Precise surgical procedures may benefit from intra-operative image guidance using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, the MRI's strong magnetic fields, fast switching gradients, and constrained space pose the need for an MR-guided robotic system to assist the surgeon. Piezoelectric actuators can be used in an MRI environment by utilizing the inverse piezoelectric effect for different application purposes. Piezoelectric ultrasonic motor (USM) is one type of MRI-compatible actuator that can actuate these robots with fast response times, compactness, and simple configuration. Although the piezoelectric motors are mostly made of nonferromagnetic material, the generation of eddy currents due to the MRI's gradient fields can lead to magnetic field distortions causing image artifacts. Motor vibrations due to interactions between the MRI's magnetic fields and those generated by the eddy currents can further degrade image quality by causing image artifacts. In this work, a plastic piezoelectric ultrasonic (USM) motor with more degree of MRI compatibility was developed and induced with preliminary optimization. Multiple parameters, namely teeth number, notch size, edge bevel or straight, and surface finish level parameters were used versus the prepressure for the experiment, and the results suggested that using 48 teeth, thin teeth notch with 0.39mm, beveled edge and a surface finish using grit number of approximate 1000 sandpaper performed a better output both in rotary speed and torque. Under this combination, the highest speed reached up to 436.6665rpm when the prepressure was low, and the highest torque reached up to 0.0348Nm when the prepressure was approximately 500g.