Kinetostatic Modeling of Redundantly Actuated Planar Compliant Parallel Mechanism

This paper presents the concept design of a novel three degrees of freedom (DOF) redundantly actuated planar compliant parallel mechanism (CPM). The developed CPM is a 4-PPR configuration mechanism based on leaf type flexures and actuated by four voice coil motors (VCMs). The distribute compliance design and the rotation-symmetric configuration guarantees large motion range, translation decouple as well as high structural compactness of the CPM. The stiffness model and kinetostatic model of the CPM are established via the compliance matrix method. Finite element analysis (FEA) is conducted to validate the established models. Numerical results show that the proposed CPM can achieve a workspace of ±2.5 mm × ± 2.5 mm × ± 2.5° in its three working directions. Moreover, the actuation forces of VCMs in the CPM can be decreased significantly by apply the redundantly actuated configuration.