Design, fabrication and testing of a serial kinematic MEMSXYstage for multifinger manipulation

In micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) it is difficult to obtain a large range of motion with a small coupled error. This limitation was overcome by designing and fabricating a nested structure as a serial kinematic mechanism (SKM). In this paper, a MEMS-based XY stage is reported for multifinger manipulation application. The SKM MEMS XY stage is implemented by embedding a single degree-of-freedom (DOF) stage into another single DOF stage. The proposed MEMS XY stage is fabricated by deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) from both sides of a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. This SKM MEMS stage has the capability to generate more than 50 µm displacements along each X- and Y -axes. This nested structure also suppressed the coupled motion error to 0.6% of the original actuation displacement. For the demonstration on the micro-particle manipulation, a 15 µm sized polypropylene particle is manipulated and rotated by operating two individual fingers attached to proposed MEMS stages.