Design and analysis of a novel compact XYZ parallel precision positioning stage

XYZ-precision positioning stages are of great significance in micro/nanoscale manipulation applications. This paper presents a novel parallel 3-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) XYZ precision positioning stage with compact structure. Compared with the existing parallel triaxial positioning stages, the proposed stage features more compact size in the height. A newly developed Z-shaped flexure hinge based mechanism is introduced in the design of stage to generate decoupled motions in both z-axis and y-axis based on the bending deformation of the beams and the differential moving principle, respectively. The input stiffness of the positioning stage is calculated by resorting to matrix-based method, and validated by finite-element analysis. The simulation results are shown to be almost consistent with the results of the derived analytical model with negligible errors. Moreover, the reachable workspace is determined and the maximum stress is also obtained by loading the assumed maximum input displacement on the platform. The preliminary results pave the way for promising applications of the proposed stage in the future.