A new large-stroke compliant joint & micro/nano positioner design based on compliant building blocks

During the phase of concept design of compliant joints & mechanisms, also synthesis of the mechanism, an effective design method is definitely important for generating a creative design. Currently, these design methods can boil down to three categories: creative thinking stepped from designer's intuition and experience, systematic design method based on topological synthesis or pseudo-rigid-body model (PRBM), and a "nature" design method in terms of compliant building block (CBB), whilst CBB method combines the advantages of the first two kinds of approaches. This paper mainly introduces the CBB design method which may lead to some new large-stroke compliant joints & micro/nano positioners. All joint and mechanism design is based on a special CBB family, i.e. Virtual-Center-of-Motion (VCM) pivots including a leaf-type isosceles-trapezoidal flexural (LITF), etc. The main advantage of the VCM CBBs is that they can achieve a virtual center of motion and regarded as a kind of high-performance flexure primitive as well. A method to construct complex compliant joints and micro/nano positioners is presented by combination of several identical or different CBBs. This method is mainly considering the trends of center-shift or error motion after combination. Some applications of this design method is tested correspondingly. As a result, a novel family of high-performance complex compliant joints or micro/nano positioners can be obtained.