Compliant mechanisms are popular to the applications of micro/nanoscale manipulations. This paper proposes a novel triaxial parallel-kinematic compliant manipulator inspired by the Tripteron mechanism. Compared to most conventional triaxial compliant mechanisms, the proposed manipulator has the merits of structure compactness and being free of assembly error due to its unique configuration and the utilize of 3D printing technology. The compliance matrix modeling method is employed to determine the input stiffness of the compliant manipulator, and it is verified by finite-element analysis (FEA). Results show that the deviations between simulation works and the derived analytical models are in an acceptable range. The simulation results also reveal that the compliant manipulator can achieve a 16 μm × 16 μm × 16 μm cubic workspace. In this motion range, the observed maximum stress is much lower than the yield strength of the material. Moreover, the dynamic characteristics of the manipulator are investigated via the simulations as well.
Keywords: compact structure; compliant manipulator; parallel-kinematic; triaxial; tripteron.