Development of precision blank carriage for manufacturing large gratings and echelles

A long-travel positioning device, which combines a ball-screw-driven coarse stage with a fine one, driven by piezoelectric translator, to achieve the long-distance traveling, up to 500 mm, as well as high-precision positioning, is crucial in the field of diffraction grating fabrication at nanometer scale. In this article, we present the design of the fine-feed drive stage with resolution as high as 20 nm and propose a single neuron-based proportional–integral–derivative controller to realize ultra-precision positioning. A high-performance piezoelectric translator is used to drive the mechanism, and the parallel leaf springs are used to guide the moving platform with preload force. A dynamic model of the precision positioning mechanism has been established by considering the Hertzian contact. In addition, the static and dynamic properties are investigated with the laser interferometry tracking methodology. The experimental results indicate that the positioning accuracy of less than 10 nm is obtained with the single neuron-based proportional–integral–derivative controller and also demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed mechanism and control strategy