Error analysis for a piezoelectric ceramic-actuated and flexure hinge-based micromanipulator

Flexure hinges manufacturing error and hysteresis nonlinearity of piezoelectric actuator are two key factors that affect control precision of micromanipulator. In order to evaluate error affects on micromanipulator accuracy, a partial differentiation error model of manufacturing error was presented. And the flexure hinges hole radius error, cross-sectional width error and minimum thickness error were respectively modeled; besides, we used finite element simulation to validate the analytical error model. The analytical and simulation result shows that the analytical error model is correct, and minimum thickness error induces biggest displacement precision error. In addition, the nonlinear error of piezoelectric actuator was considered, and support vector machine for regression (SVR) was used to model hysteresis nonlinearity. The experiment results show that SVR nonlinear model can accurately describe the nonlinear error. The obtained error model and data are used to establish a theoretical limit for the design and precision control of micromanipulator.