Display omitted •The competitive merits of piezoelectric motor for the S&A (safety and arming device) are analyzed in detail.•An H-shaped piezoelectric motor based S&A is proposed, designed and fabricated based on the concept of self-moving.•The design procedures and working mechanisms are explained and experimentally verified.•The designed piezoelectric motor based S&A can change its state from safety to arming or reversely within 25 ms. In this contribution, an H-shaped piezoelectric motor based safety and arming device that is driven by the hybrid of symmetrical first longitudinal mode and second bending mode is proposed, designed and experimental investigated. The proposed system operates based on the concept of self-moving and show potential infield of fuse system with different calibers. The actuating mechanism is that the four driving feet contact with the guides alternately and push the motor to move continuously. Modal and harmonic analysis are conducted to determine the dimension of the structure, confirm the working principle and analyze the motion trajectories of driving feet with finite element method. It is shown that trajectories of the driving feet are oblique ellipses with different angles because of the asymmetry of structure. In addition, a prototype is fabricated and experimented. The results show that the average speeds of the prototype in two directions are 120.6 mm/s and 130.1 mm/s respectively under the driving voltage of 120 V0-p and working frequency of 88.5 kHz. The H-shaped piezoelectric motor based safety and arming device can change its state from safety to arming or reversely in 25 ms with the fixed stroke of 3 mm.