Development and control of a compact 3-DOF micromanipulator for high-precise positioning

This paper presents a compact 3-DOF micromanipulator, which is a variant of the rigid 3-P(4S) parallel mechanism. Due to the special design, the proposed micromanipulator is compact in structure and large in workspace. Firstly, the design process of the micromanipulator is demonstrated in this paper. Then the mathematical model of the micromanipulator is derived, in which stiffness model of the compliant P(4S) chain and total stiffness of the compliant 3-P(4S)mechanism are calculated. Finally, a prototype of the micromanipulator is fabricated. Three electromagnetic actuators are utilized in this design. Control system based on dSPACE system is established and preliminary experiments are conducted. Both FEA simulation and experimental results reveal that the proposed micromanipulator has a good positioning performance, which is highly desirable in micro/nano manipulation and manufacturing. The main advantages of the micromanipulator are compact in structure, easy to control and non-contact in actuation.