Design of a partially decoupled high precision XYZ compliant parallel micromanipulator

A newly designed three-degree-of-freedom compliant parallel micromanipulator (CPM) with partially decoupled characteristics of XYZ translational motion is proposed in this paper. The CPM is driven by the selected piezoelectric actuators (PZTs) whose strokes are amplified by using the amplification lever mechanism. The design procedure of the CPM is presented in detail, and the CPM parasitic motion is studied analytically. Moreover, its motion properties are verified through the finite element analysis conducted with ANSYS software package. The simulation results reveal that the CPM has negligible parasitic rotations and negligible parasitic translation along one direction, and it possesses a good decoupled property. The CPM is expected to be applied to operate the objects in micro/nano-meter scales with high precision.