Modularized design and development of a piezo-actuated translational manipulator

Piezo-actuated micro/nano manipulators have been extensively investigated in the past decades. A large number of prototypes and products were developed to perform micro/nano operations. In general, once built, the characteristics of a micro/nano manipulator are fixed and not changeable. Therefore, one manipulator is particularly well-suited to certain special tasks. A new modularized design methodology is proposed in this paper where a multiple degree-of-freedom (DOF) translational manipulator can be built up by stacking several 1-DOF modules. The proposed methodology is widely applicable in that: a) these 1-DOF modules can work individually or they can be stacked as a single manipulator to generate 1-DOF to 3-DOF translational motions; and b) each module has 2 installation positions for the piezoelectric actuator, and thus the characteristics of the module can be altered according to the requirement, such as the motion range and the output stiffness. The mechanical design the 1-DOF module and the combination patterns of multiple 1-DOF modules are presented in this paper. Finite element analysis is conducted to verify the design methodology before the manufacturing and testing of the 1-DOF module. Further, a multi-DOF translational manipulator is developed and the experimental results are presented.