Design and control of 6-DOF high-precision scan stage with gravity canceller

High-precision scan stages are used for fabrication of integrated circuits, liquid crystal displays and so on. To fabricate such precise devices, not only stages position but also stages attitude needs to be controlled rapidly and precisely. In this paper, an experimental 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) high-precision stage with a novel 6-DOF air bearing called “gravity canceller” is designed and fabricated. The 6-DOF stage consists of a fine stage and a coarse stage. The gravity canceller compensates for the fine stage´s gravity and supports the fine stage without friction. This structure enables us to reduce heat which is generated close to the fine stage. For a 6-DOF control problem, attitude control is as important as translational control. Rotational motion, however, has nonlinearity and coupling arising from dynamics and kinematics which could degrade the attitude control performance. Therefore, in our past paper, our research group proposed a multi-input multi-output nonlinear feedforward attitude controller to compensate such problems. Experiments were performed to verify the effectiveness of the attitude controller by using the new experimental 6-DOF stage.