Design of a Compliant XY Positioning Stage With Large Workspace

Flexure mechanisms become more and more popular because of their better performance, easy maintenance, wear-free properties and predictability of kinematic variables changes. Comparing to traditional ball bearings or linear slides, however, range of motion limits flexure mechanisms applications in existing market. This paper presents the design of a novel planar XY stage synthesizing the benefits of parallel and serial kinematic constraint. By parallel connecting two mechanisms: the vertical and horizontal subsystems, which both have degrees of freedom (DOFs) in primary moving direction but different degrees of constraints (DOCs) in rotation, this system is able to reduce three parasitic rotation angles (pitch, roll and yaw) less than one micro radium and also have motion range up to 40mm × 40mm. Analytical model and finite element analysis (FEA) are present to validate the performance of this stage and also determine appropriate operation parameters.Copyright © 2015 by ASME