Design of flexure-based modular architecture micro-positioning stage

As the current trend in numerous industrial domains is to miniaturise products, micro-positioning stage(MPS) capable of performing micro-manipulation and micro-assembly tasks with sub-micrometer or nanometer precision is playing an increasing important role in these fields. In addition, well performances and low cost are two emergency issues need to be addressed for widely using flexure-based MPSs. However, the design and fabrication process for MPSs at present are costly both in time and money. Especially, the designed configurations are tailored to a specific application without flexibility. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to introduce a design of precision flexure-based reconfigurable MPSs which provide better flexibility and functionality and allows to reduce the time to market significantly. To begin with, performance requirements and benefits for reconfigurable MPSs are introduced. Then, some typical modules and their functions are introduced in detail. Finally, some selective stages assembled with function modules are proposed as case studies, for the purpose of validating the benefits of reconfigurable MPSs.