Development of a Driving and Control System of Large Stroke 3-D Air-Floating Motion Stage With Submicrometer-Scale Positioning Accuracy

For the practical development needs of high-precision multidimensional positioning systems in microelectronic packaging, ultraprecision machining, biomedical engineering, and optical precision engineering, it is urgent to carry out research on new multidimensional positioning stages, large stroke and high-precision driving methods, and other technologies. The structure and driving system of a large stroke submicrometer-scale 3-D air-floating motion stage (AFMS) is mainly introduced in this article. A ${Z}$ -balance weight system and composite control strategy have been proposed to achieve 100-mm stable running, to meet white light interference scanning, laser positioning calibration, and other fields of vertical large-scale measurement needs. The stroke of the positioning system of the 3-D AFMS can reach $100\times 100\times100$ mm. Accordingly, the positioning repeatability is better than $0.41 \mu \text{m}$ ( ${k}$ = 2). Based on the results of the dynamic testing of the full stroke, the maximum fluctuation of the yaw and pitch angles is not more than 0.5 arcsec. The ${Z}$ -direction positioning fluctuation can be limited to ±9 nm within the range of 100 mm of the full stroke. The repeatability of a contact probe was better than 19.94 nm ( ${k}$ = 2) through the compound control strategy of the ${Z}$ -stage in coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) application. According to the series of verification experiments, the large stroke ultraprecise 3-D AFMS developed in this work can be suitable for driving and control tasks in CMMs, microlithography, and micromachining applications.