Development of flexure based 6-degrees of freedom parallel nano-positioning system with large displacement

This paper details the development of a novel flexure jointed precision parallel nano-positioning system in combination with piezo-electric stepping motor for the application of precise optics alignment. The characteristics of the developed system are evaluated in this paper by the simulation and experiments. Based on the precision piezo-electric stepping motor and flexure joints, a high precision motion is obtained. Results of this paper include that of a translation resolution of 15 nm and a rotational resolution of 0.14 arc sec being achieved. In addition, the piezo-electric stepping motors provide a power-off hold characteristic to the system. Meanwhile, the parallel structure provides the high dynamic bandwidth of the lowest resonant frequency of 396.1 Hz. The symmetric structure is advantageous for thermal variation. To increase the motion range of the system, all of flexure joints are designed specially and the coupled workspace of +/- 2 mm x +/- 2 mm x +/- 2 mm x +/- 2 degrees x +/- 2 degrees x +/- 2 degrees is achieved. The overall size of the designed system is Phi 350 mm x 120 mm. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3693345]