Design of a new decoupled XYZ compliant parallel micropositioning stage with compact structure

The design procedure for a new decoupled flexure-based XYZ compliant parallel-kinematics micropositioning stage is presented in this paper. The designed XYZ stage owns a compact structure constructed by three monolithic limbs and has both input and output decoupling properties. The output decoupling is allowed by the employment of a proposed 2-D compound parallelogram flexure, and the input decoupling is implemented by the actuation isolation which is enabled by the double compound parallelogram flexure with large transverse stiffness. The modeling for the output compliance, input stiffness, and amplification ratio of the XYZ stage are conducted by resorting to the matrix method, which are validated by the finite element analysis performed with ANSYS. The presented results are helpful for the design of a new XYZ compliant parallel micromanipulator for micro/nano scale manipulation.