Design modification of a 3-PRC compliant parallel micromanipulator for micro/nano scale manipulation

The requirements of micro/nano scale manipulation have stimulated the activities around the design and development of new micromanipulators with ultrahigh precision recently. A novel compliant parallel micromanipulator (CPM) with 3-PRC architecture has been proposed in previous works of the authors. However, it has been found that there exist some drawbacks in the preliminarily designed CPM in terms of stress stiffening, buckling phenomenon, large parasitic motions, and limited workspace, etc. For the sake of getting rid of these disadvantages, the original 3-PRC CPM is modified in the paper so as to make it possible to be applied in micro/nano scale manipulation fields. Not only the design modification precesses are presented in details, but also the performance validations of the modified CPM are conducted via simulations with ANSYS software.