Design of Reconfigurable Planar Micro-Positioning Stages Based on Function Modules

Abstract

Micro-positioning stages, which are capable to meet the emerging industrial trend for performing various kinds of micro-manipulation and micro-assembly tasks are the crucial tools to miniaturize the products under ultra-high precision. The current main practice is to specifically tailor a monolithic positioning stage design for one kind of micro-manipulation application. However, the design and fabrication of such a specific flexure-based micro-positioning stage are expensive in both the time and financial investment. In order to increase the flexibility and functionality of micro-positioning stages, this paper proposes a novel reconfigurable planar micro-positioning stages platform based on different function modules. A functional model-based approach is developed to divide one micro-positioning stage into a set of functionally independent sub-models, which allows flexible composition resulting in an adjustable new stage. The robustness of the proposed platform is demonstrated using some typical micro-positioning stages benchmarking cases. The effectiveness of assembly using flexible function modules is verified to show the benefits of the proposed design platform for reconfigurable micro-positioning stages.