Design, analysis and testing of a parallel-kinematic high-bandwidth XY nanopositioning stage

This paper presents the design, analysis, and testing of a parallel-kinematic high-bandwidth XY nanopositioning stage driven by piezoelectric stack actuators. The stage is designed with two kinematic chains. In each kinematic chain, the end-effector of the stage is connected to the base by two symmetrically distributed flexure modules, respectively. Each flexure module comprises a fixed-fixed beam and a parallelogram flexure serving as two orthogonal prismatic joints. With the purpose to achieve high resonance frequencies of the stage, a novel center-thickened beam which has large stiffness is proposed to act as the fixed-fixed beam. The center-thickened beam also contributes to reducing cross-coupling and restricting parasitic motion. To decouple the motion in two axes totally, a symmetric configuration is adopted for the parallelogram flexures. Based on the analytical models established in static and dynamic analysis, the dimensions of the stage are optimized in order to maximize the first resonance frequency. Then finite element analysis is utilized to validate the design and a prototype of the stage is fabricated for performance tests. According to the results of static and dynamic tests, the resonance frequencies of the developed stage are over 13.6 kHz and the workspace is 11.2 μm × 11.6 μm with the cross-coupling between two axes less than 0.52%. It is clearly demonstrated that the developed stage has high resonance frequencies, a relatively large travel range, and nearly decoupled performance between two axes. For high-speed tracking performance tests, an inversion-based feedforward controller is implemented for the stage to compensate for the positioning errors caused by mechanical vibration. The experimental results show that good tracking performance at high speed is achieved, which validates the effectiveness of the developed stage.