Calibration of a 6-DOF parallel micromanipulator for nanomanipulation

Nanomanipulation is a key enabling technology for many nanometer scale applications. To realize the full 6-DOF nanomanipulation, parallel micromanipulators have manys advantages comparing to the serial ones. Due to the machining and assembly errors, kinematic calibration is necessary to improve the accuracy further. For the 3-limb 6-dof manipulator in this paper, the error model of it was first developed based on the inverse solutions. The scheme for detecting the positions and poses of the end-effector was also determined. The least square method was used to identify the main parameters of the parallel manipulator, and the identified dimensions were used to control the manipulator. The experiments results verify the effectiveness of the calibration processes.