A Novel 5-DOF Flexure-based Passive Alignment Stage for Microassembly System

In order to avoid the damage of collision between the assembly targets during microassembly, a new 5-degree-of-freedom (5-DOF) fleuxre-based passive alignment stage for microassembly system is presented. With fiber assembly as the application field, the design, modeling and simulation of the proposed stage are proposed. The proposed stage mainly consists of a 3-DOF in-plane mechanism and a 2-DOF off-plane mechanism. The alignment motion of the stage is achieved by adopting a variety of flexure hinges. Due to the remote center of compliance (RCC) characteristic, the proposed stage can compensate position error in different directions decoupleably. In order to guarantee successful fiber assembly process, the stiffness of the proposed stage is strictly controlled. The pseudo-rigid-body-model (PRBM) method is utilized to calculate the stiffness of the stage along its working directions. Then the finite element analysis (FEA) is conducted to verify the stiffness theoretical model and test the dynamic performance of the stage. Both the theoretical and FEA results demonstrate the superior property of the design, which indicates that the proposed stage can meet the requirements for compensating the relative position error between the fiber and the optical switch.