Development of a middle-range six-degrees-of-freedom system

This paper describes the successful development of a middle-range six-degrees-of-freedom stage, using the features of a flexible structure. The system includes two parts: a middle-range positioning X— Y stage and a four-degrees-of-freedom stage. The flexible structure of the four-degrees-of-freedom stage is built from two kinds of flexible bodies: circular hinges and a new two-degrees-of-freedom flexible body. The four-degrees-of-freedom stage was designed to compensate movement errors including linear displacement, pitch, and roll errors. The linear displacement reaches 20 mm along the X-axis, 20 mm along the Y-axis, and 5 μm along the Z-axis. The rotation angle around the X-axis (θ x), Y-axis (θ y), and Z-axis (θ z) were all 10 arcsec. A novel six-degrees-of-freedom measuring system was also designed. Precision feedback control is demonstrated in a series of experiments performed using the proposed measurement system.