Design and kinematics of a 3-DOF compliant triglide micromanipulator

Abstract This paper proposes a novel 3-degrees of freedom (DOF) compliant parallel micromanipulator. The design of the mechanism is based on triglide parallel manipulator. The compliant version of the triglide is prepared by making use of flexure joints. Displacement amplifiers are incorporated in the design to increase range of motions. The pseudo-rigid-body modeling technique is then used to formulate and solve the inverse kinematic problem for the design. To check the correctness and accuracy of the analytical kinematic model FEA simulations are performed in Abaqus-6.14 environment. Simulation results reveal that the proposed micromanipulator can perform different motions very effectively. Additionally, it is found that results predicted by the analytical model conform very closely to the simulation outcomes. The errors are very low, and the motions involve negligible parasitic motions.