Design and control of a fast and precise macro/micro-manipulator

Coarse/fine position systems have been proposed, analysed and used as a mean of enhancing the performance in manufacturing tasks. The objective of the research is to combine a micro-manipulator to a general task manipulator to realize both accurate and fast manipulation. This paper presents first the design of an electromagnetic micro-manipulator and its performance. The system achieves an accuracy better than 1um within a range of 1mm. Secondly the paper presents the overall experimental setup which consists of a micro-manipulator (for fine positioning) mounted on a macro-manipulator (for large movement). Simulations have proven the capability of the micro-manipulator to improve the endpoint accuracy of the whole system.