Basic aspects concerning modular design of reconfigurable parallel manipulators for assembly tasks at nanoscale

Abstract

The trend to miniaturization in the field of objects assembly and manipulation is leading to increasing de-mand for devices that can precisely position and assemble microcomponents with an accuracy of less than one mi-crometer. Therefore the interest of designing such robots that are able to successfully succeed with these operations is also increasing. For this kind of operations, hybrid struc-tures are recommended. The hybrid structure is composed of two components; the first one is a parallel reconfigur-able component which is able to succeed operations with micrometer precision and the second one is a serial com-ponent constituted with the use of piezo actuators and is capable to realize operations with nanometer precision. The main interest of this paper is the basic design of a ro-bot with hybrid architecture for precision assembly and manipulation but is focused mainly on its parallel compo-nent.