Design and Experimental Testing of an Improved Large Range Decoupled XY Compliant Parallel Micromanipulator1

Abstract

There is an increasing need for XY compliant parallel micromanipulators (CPMs) providing good performance characteristics such as large motion range, wellconstrained crossaxis coupling, and parasitic rotation. Decoupled topology design of the CPMs can easily realize these merits without increasing the difficulty of controlling. This paper proposes an improved 4PP model on the basis of a classical 4PP model and both of them are selected for manufacturing and testing to verify the effectiveness of the improvement. It has shown from experimental results that there is a large improvement on the performances of improved 4PP compliant parallel manipulator (CPM): large range of motion up to 5 mm أ— 5 mm in the unidirection in the dimension of 311 mm أ— 311 mm أ— 24 mm, smaller compliance fluctuation (only 36.63% of that of the initial 4PP model), smaller crossaxis coupling (only 28.10% of that of the initial 4PP model generated by a singleaxis 5 mm actuation), smaller inplane parasitic yaw (only 57.14% of that of the initial 4PP model generated by doubleaxis 5 mm actuation).