ALIO’s Hybrid Hexapod has less than 100 nm ‘3-Dimensional 6 axis Point Precision’ repeatability, making it an essential technology for mission-critical applications in the laser processing, optical inspection, photonics, semiconductor, metrology, and medical device sectors, and indeed all micro-machining projects.
A major photonics customer recently commented: “We demanded an NDA to ensure ALIO does not even mention our company since the ALIO Hybrid Hexapod is a game changer in our industry.”
In complex applications where high precision, six degree of freedom (6-DOF) motion is required, a hexapod has become the go-to solution due to its compact size and the fact that it is more reliable than serial stacked stages with their inherent stack-up of errors, alignment difficulties, and cable management issues.
However, with the exponential demand across industry for sub-micron levels of miniaturisation and the requirements for process applications motion systems that move from micro to nano levels of precision, traditional hexapods cannot achieve the desired results.
This is due to performance limitations inherent in traditional hexapod designs that require the accurate coordination of the movement of all six axes to accomplish a motion profile, even if the requirement is only for a simple single-axis motion. In addition, despite the fact that the general perception is that hexapods exhibit good stiffness compared to serial stacked multi-axis systems, this is really only in the vertical Z-axis, with weaknesses in the X-Y plane.
ALIO’s Hybrid Hexapod takes a different approach to traditional 6-DOF positioning devices and exhibits much higher performance at extremely competitive prices. Rather than six independent legs (and 12 connection joints), ALIO’s approach combines a precision X-Y monolithic stage, tripod, and continuous rotation theta-Z axis to provide superior overall performance.
The combination of serial and parallel kinematics at the heart of ALIO’s 6-D Nano Precision stages renders traditional hexapod kinematics obsolete, with orders-of-magnitude improvements in precision, path performance, speed, stiffness and a larger work envelope with virtually unlimited X-Y travel, and fully programmable tool centre point locations.
