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With many micromanipulator designs emerging in micro and nanosystem applications, the element of compliance in the mechanisms is gaining attention. Several designs consider motions limited in a plane for high accuracy and repeatability as needed in micro/nano manipulation applications. Extending this to a full spatial configuration with coupled motions of series and parallel linkages with flexure joints of 1-degree-of-freedom (DOF) and 3-DOF needs a systematic analytical approach. One such approach for compliance analysis is presented in this article for a mechanism designed at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. To validate the analytical models, finite element analysis simulations are performed with the help of the Abaqus-6.14 software package. Following the successful validation, the effect of structural parameters on the performance is presented with the help of the analytical expressions. We explore the performance of the mechanism with different dimensions of flexures of a particular type. Results indicate that the design with dissimilar dimensional parameters can give superior performance.

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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.

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