Design and Analysis of a Novel 3-DOF Out-of-plane Micropositioning Mechanism

This paper proposes a novel 3-DOF high-precision monolithic micropositioning mechanism. The goal of this study is to develop an out-of-plane parallel kinematic manipulator with low parasitic motion and a large workspace. The mechanism consists of three driving arms, and each driving arm features two snowflake hinges, each boasting with two degrees of freedom. The driving arms are driven by piezoelectric actuators (PEAs) coupled with double symmetric five-bar displacement amplification mechanisms. The displacement amplifier perpendicularly transforms the translational motion of the PEA; therefore, the design offers a small footprint. An investigation was conducted through finite element analysis (FEA) to study the proposed mechanism's performance and develop the inverse kinematic model. The mechanism offers a large workspace of $\pm 4.610\text{mrad} \times \pm 4.004\text{mrad}\times\pm 179.3\mu \mathrm{m}$ .