Development of a piezo-actuated high-precision flexible parallel mechanism

A flexible parallel manipulator was proposed for high-precision pointing, which employed flexure hinges as passive joints and oriented its moving platform along all six degrees of freedom by means of six independent piezoelectric actuators. A right-circular flexure hinge with high motion accuracy and large displacement was designed based on performance analysis. The parameters of parallel mechanism were optimized by multi-objective optimization on the foundation of inverse kinematics. Moreover, workspace determination and simulation analysis were performed based on the final designed mechanism. Finally, a high-precision pointing system was built up and the performance tests had been implemented, which validated the proposed system satisfied the requirement of design targets. The concept and approach outlined can be extended to a variety of applications.