  A compliant parallel micromanipulator is a mechanism in which the moving
platform is connected to the base through a number of flexural components.
Utilizing parallel-kinematics configurations and flexure joints, the monolithic
micromanipulators can achieve extremely high motion resolution and accuracy. In
this work, the focus was towards the experimental evaluation of a 3-DOF
($Z{\theta}_{x}{\theta}_{y}$) monolithic flexure-based piezo-driven
micromanipulator for precise out-of-plane micro/nano positioning applications.
The monolithic structure avoids the deficiencies of non-monolithic designs such
as backlash, wear, friction, and improves the performance of micromanipulator
in terms of high resolution, accuracy, and repeatability. A computational study
was conducted to investigate and obtain the inverse kinematics of the proposed
micromanipulator. As a result of computational analysis, the developed
prototype of the micromanipulator is capable of executing large motion range of
$\pm$238.5$\mu$m $\times$ $\pm$4830.5$\mu$rad $\times$ $\pm$5486.2$\mu$rad.
Finally, a sliding mode control strategy with nonlinear disturbance observer
(SMC-NDO) was designed and implemented on the proposed micromanipulator to
obtain system behaviors during experiments. The obtained results from different
experimental tests validated the fine micromanipulator's positioning ability
and the efficiency of the control methodology for precise micro/nano
manipulation applications. The proposed micromanipulator achieved very fine
spatial and rotational resolutions of $\pm$4nm, $\pm$250nrad, and $\pm$230nrad
throughout its workspace.
