Kinetostatic optimization of a MEMS-based compliant 3 DOF plane parallel platform

A new plane parallel micro-manipulator is presented in this paper, together with the numerical procedure that has been used in order to optimize some kinetostatic performance indices, among which the kinematic condition number and the mechanical advantage. The approach is based on a refined simplification of the direct kinematic problem and it is applied to the pseudo-rigid body model of the original compliant mechanism, with an acceptable approximation. The method has been iterated several times to evaluate a fitness function that has been used by an Evolutionary Method of computation for the search of global optimum, namely, a Genetic Algorithm. The results will be used for refining the geometric design of the parallel micro-manipulator, which will be built by means of MEMS-Based technologies in silicon. © 2013 IEEE