Design for control of a flexure jointed optical servo scanning platform

High resolution and precision servo mechanism has played an important role in micro and nano optics. Its application includes projection systems, head-mount displays, scanners, cameras, heat tracking systems and so on... The servo mechanisms are often used to enhance the optical resolution by driving the scanning mirrors to reach position resolution far beyond the conventional optical systems. It is often necessary for these servo mechanisms to achieve high operation speeds while maintaining extreme positioning accuracy. To achieve this goal, this paper introduces a novel, high speed, high precision servo mechanism for an optical scanning platform. The proposed design uses piezoelectric transducers (PZT) with flexure joints. The use of the flexure joints not only eliminates backlash to achieve smooth and continuous displacement but also reduces friction to eradicate the need for lubrication. In order to understand the basic dynamics of the platform, this paper uses ANSYS for the finite element analysis (FEA) of all the desirable physical properties of the mechanism. The FEA analysis is also used for simulating the dynamic behavior of the control system. Based on the simulation results an improved controller is constructed for better scanning resolutions.