Development of Dual-Actuated Stage for Positioning Applications Prabha Niranjan 1 , K. V. S. S. S. S. Sairam 1 , Shashikantha Karinka 2 1 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, 2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, NMAMIT, Nitte. prabhan@nitte.edu.in Abstract. Piezoelectric actuators have been widely used in precision positioning applications because of their fast response, fine resolution, and large actuating forces. The displacement of piezoelectric actuators should be precisely controlled to use them in precision actuation stages. However to use these piezoelectric actu- ators in control systems, it is very much necessary to estimate the displacement of actuator based on their input voltage and also the inverse model. This paper pres- ents Prandtl-Ishlinskii model for describing the nonlinearity of the actuator. Inverse Prandtl-Ishlinskii model will be used in the feed forward loop for the compensation of nonlinearity. This research work also includes development of a dual-actuated single stage to overcome the small travel range of piezoelectric stack actuators. The piezoelectric stack actuator is used for fine positioning and ball screw actuator is used for coarse positioning in the proposed dual-actuated stage. A closed loop con- trol will be designed for the dual positioning stage, and this stage will be later applied for real-time wing flap control of aircraft model. Keywords: Piezoelectric actuator; Prandtl-Ishlinskii model; Positioning; Closed loop control system; Displacement; Dual-Stage; Ball screw actuator. 1 Introduction In recent years, there is lot of scope for research in ultra precision positioning applica- tions. It includes diamond cutting, drilling machine, wing flap control in aircraft etc. Such ultra precision position systems require displacement control in the range of micrometers to millimeters. In ultra-precision positioning, the piezoelectric actuators are used because of their good dynamic response and high resolution. It can be used for nano-positioning drives but it is bit tedious to provide higher load capacity. Whereas ball screw provides higher load capacity and stiffness but it fails in providing accuracy in sub-micrometer range [1],[2]. Hence for high precision machines, dual positioning systems have been developed where piezoelectric actuator is used for fine positioning and ball screw actuator is used for coarse positioning [3], [4], [5]. 93 Research in Computing Science 103 (2015) pp. 93–98; rec. 2015-06-03; acc. 2015-06-20