Integrated Design of a Secondary Stage for Magnetically Levitated Dual-Stage Positioning System

This paper presents the integrated design of a magnetically levitated dual-stage positioning system to improve the bandwidth of traditional maglev positioning systems. The primary stage of the proposed dual-stage system is a 6 DOF maglev positioning system, and a specifically designed flexure-based actuator is utilized as the secondary stage to further compensate the error of primary stage. Compared with the primary maglev stage, the flexure-based secondary stage owns the advantages such as high stiffness, high nature frequency, and non-commutation. The plant and controller parameters of the secondary stage is integrally designed in this work, where various control/mechanical specifications are considered and formulated as the constraints in an optimization problem. The prototype of designed secondary stage is fabricated, and the experiments indicate that the bandwidth of the flexure-based secondary stage is largely improved compared with the primary maglev stage.