A Novel Compliant Rotation Reduction Mechanism and its Application in Micro-Rotation Manipulation

The design and analysis of compact micro-rotation stages have been key issues in the field of precision engineering. Introducing compliant motion scaling mechanism for the rotary micro-driving components improves the actual rotation resolution by reducing the rotation in a linear and stable output stage; however, the existing compliant rotation reduction mechanism (CRRM) relies on the remote center of motion, which needs quite high fabrication precision to maintain the expected performance and further has an adverse effect on miniaturized applications. In this paper, a novel CRRM which does not utilise a remote center of motion is proposed and analysed. Inspired by cantilevers, the conceptional design is firstly described. Under the linear elastic and Euler-Bernoulli assumptions, the rotation gain of proposed CRRM is formulated. Further, the proposed CRRM and established model are verified using finite element analysis. Finally, an application of the proposed CRRM in micro-rotation manipulation is presented.