UlE, as a kind of ultra-low thermal expansion glass, has been widely applied in large-aperture optical mirrors and space telescopes. However, hard-brittle material feature of ULE brings certain difficulty for machining. In this paper, rotary ultrasonic vibration-assisted peripheral grinding (RUPG), combining rotary ultrasonic vibrationUVand conventional grinding (CG) is proposed, and grinding process and quality characteristic are investigated in terms of surface morphology, grinding force, surface roughness, subsurface damage depth, and subsurface morphology. A serious of comparative experiments for between RUPG and CG were conducted. The results show that rotary UV in RUPG can markedly decrease the grinding force with a factor of 46.78%. The change rule of grinding force with the varying of grinding parameters in RUPG is consistent with that in CG, i.e., grinding force increases as the increasing of grinding depth and feed rate, while it decreases with the growth of spindle speed. Grinding surface marks were found to be obviously weakened by UV and surface consistency was accordingly improved. Besides, measurement results of surface roughness also real that UV plays a positive role in diminishing surface roughness by almost 23.01%, and reducing the subsurface damage depth by a factor of 17.19%. © 2023 SPIE. All rights reserved.