Piezoelectric Actuators (PEAs) are devices that can support large actuation forces compared to their small size and are widely used in high-precision applications where micro- and nano-positioning are required. Nonetheless, these actuators have undeniable non-linearities, the well-known ones being creep, vibration dynamics, and hysteresis. The latter originate from a combination of mechanical strain and electric field action; as a consequence, these can affect the PEA tracking performance and even reach instability. The scope of this paper is to reduce the hysteresis effect using and comparing different control strategies like feedback with a Feed-Forward (FF) structure, which is often used to compensate the non-linearities and diminish the errors due to uncertainties. In this research, black-box models are analyzed; subsequently, a classic feedback control like Proportional-Integral (PI) control is combined with the FF methods proposed separately and embedded into a dSpace platform to perform real-time experiments. Results are analyzed in-depth in terms of the error, the control signal, and the Integral of the Absolute Error (IAE). It is found that with the proposed methods, the hysteresis effect could be diminished to acceptable ranges for high-precision tracking with a satisfactory control signal.
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