Design of an additive manufactured XY compliant manipulator with spatial redundant constraints

This paper presents an additive manufactured beam flexure-based XY positioning stage with spatial redundant constraints. In order to restrict rotational error motions of the guidance module, a spatial redundant constraint is introduced. An additive manufacturing technique is adopted to monolithically fabricate the proposed positioning stage. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed XY positioning stage is capable to achieve ±2 × 2 mm2 working range. The fabricated prototyping stage shows that the advanced manufactured flexure mechanism can achieve good geometric effect and could be a good alternative to a metal-based flexure mechanism.