A Piezo-Actuated High-Precision Flexible Parallel Pointing Mechanism: Conceptual Design, Development, and Experiments

Abstract

A high-precision pointing mechanism for intersatellite optical communication is presented in this paper, which employs flexure hinges as the passive joints and orients its moving platform by means of six piezoelectric actuators. The proposed mechanism features submicroradian resolution and microradian repeatability within a submilliradian pointing range. A corner-filleted flexure hinge considering manufacturing tolerance with high motion accuracy and large displacement is designed based on performance analysis, and the theoretical analysis is also validated by FEA simulation and experimental testing within a 5% error margin. The parameters of the parallel mechanism are synthesized by multiobjective optimization on the basis of inverse kinematics model. Moreover, the workspace determination and the FEA analysis of the optimized mechanism are also performed. Finally, a high-precision pointing prototype is fabricated and the performance testing has been implemented, which validate the effectiveness of the proposed system.