Design of a flexure-based XY positioning stage with balanced axial forces on decoupling modules

This paper presents a novel beam flexure-based XY positioning stage with an axial force balanced design of double parallelogram decoupling modules. By mean of connecting two decoupling modules along the same actuation axis, the axial forces are evenly applied to each side of the motion stage. Therefore the in-plane rotation can be significantly restricted. Also a redundant constraint is proposed to the guidance module to restrict its rotational motions. The monolithical fabrication of the spatial configuration of the proposed mechanism can be resorted to additive manufactured technology. Numerical simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed XY positioning stage.