Design and development of a low-cost flexure-based hand-held mechanism for micromanipulation

This paper presents a 3-DOF low-cost hand-held micromanipulator driven by 3 piezoelectric actuators and built using rapid prototyping. Traditional pin and ball joints have been commonly replaced by flexure-based methods in the field of micromanipulation. Utilization of flexure-based joints have several advantages like the non-existence of backlash and assembly errors. However, most of the present flexure-based mechanisms are bulky and not suitable for hand-held applications. It is difficult and expensive to make such compact mechanism using traditional machining methods. In additional, traditional machining methods are limited to simple design. To reduce the cost of fabrication and also to allow more complex designs, Objet (a rapid prototyping machine) is proposed to be used to build the mechanism. With regards to hand-held applications, the size of the mechanism is a constraint. Hence, a parallel manipulator design is the preferred choice as compared to a serial mechanism because of its rigidity, compactness, and simplicity in design. For the illustration of an application, the mechanism is designed with an intraocular needle attached to it. Possible applications of this design include enhancement of performance in microsurgery and cell micromanipulation. Experiments are also conducted to evaluate the manipulator´s tracking performance of the needle tip at a frequency of 10 Hz.