Design of a new decoupled XY flexure parallel kinematic manipulator with actuator isolation

The design procedure for a totally decoupled XY flexure parallel kinematic manipulator is presented in this paper. The designed XY stage is featured with flexure hinges and a relatively simple structure. The output decoupling is allowed by the employment of compound parallelogram flexure, and the input decoupling is implemented by actuation isolation which is enabled by the double compound parallelogram flexure with large transverse stiffness. An improved displacement amplifier is adopted to amplify the stroke of linear actuator and to simplify the stage architecture. Kinematic models of both the amplifier and the XY stage are conducted by resorting to compliance analysis based on matrix method, which are validated by finite element analysis performed with ANSYS. The presented results are helpful for the design of a new XY flexure parallel manipulator for micro/nano scale manipulation.