Hysteresis modeling of piezoelectric actuator using particle swarm optimization-based neural network

Piezoelectric actuators have been received much attention for the advantages of high precision, no wear and rapid response, etc. However, the intrinsic hysteresis behavior of the piezoelectric materials seriously degraded the output performance of piezoelectric actuators. In this paper, to decrease such nonlinear effects and further improve the output performances of piezoelectric actuators, a modified nonlinear autoregressive moving average with exogenous inputs model, which could describe the rate-dependent hysteresis features of piezoelectric actuators was investigated. In the experiment, the different topologies of the proposed back propagation neural network algorithm were compared and the optimal topology was selected considering both the tracking precision and the structure complexity. The experimental results validated that the modified nonlinear autoregressive moving average with exogenous inputs model featured the hysteresis characteristics description ability with high precision, and the predicted motion matched well with the real trajectory. Then, the initial parameters of the back propagation neural network algorithm were further optimized by particle swarm optimization algorithm. The experimental results also verified that the proposed model based on particle swarm optimization–back propagation neural network algorithm was more accurate than that identified through the conventional back propagation neural network algorithm, and has a better predicting performance.