Stiffness and Kinematic Analysis of a Novel Compliant Parallel Micromanipulator for Biomedical Manipulation

This chapter presents the stiffness and kinematic analysis of a novel compliant parallel micromanipulator. There are two types of the structure of the compliant mechanism: serial structure and parallel structure. Kinematics issue of parallel mechanism is related to the joint variables and position and orientation of the end-effector, which is the basis of many performance indexes. The matrix displacement method is utilized to formulate the stiffness model of the proposed novel parallel micromanipulator. An accurate kinematics model is beneficial for the performance evaluation. Moreover, it can be used for control purpose for the micromanipulator. The stiffness and kinematics models of the manipulator are derived based on the matrix displacement method. The manipulator is compact in size and large in stroke, which makes it suitable for biomedical manipulations in a limited space. The stiffness and kinematic analysis method is implemented on the proposed manipulator as an example.