Compressive Sensing-Based Metrology for Micropositioning Stages Characterization

High accuracy is a necessary condition for reliable performance of micropositioning stages (MPSs). However, there are various sources of errors that affect their precision. Characterization is a prior step to calibration for compensating systematic errors so as to improve the positioning accuracy. In this letter, the compressive sensing (CS) theory is applied to characterize system errors of MPSs. This method could be flexibly collaborated with any sensors and applicable to widespread microsystems where the motions and errors are required to be measured. CS 1) improves the data acquisition and processing in terms of time and 2) could be employed as an interpolating strategy to efficiently replace the lookup tables. As a case study, the CS-based method is applied to characterize the position-dependent errors of an XY serial MPS. Experimental results show that the method is able to retrieve the microscale positions with largely shortened time and high precision. The spent time for data acquisition and processing is shortened by more than 84% for X stage and 82% for Y stage. These results are especially promising for microscale purposes where the system behavior is varying and difficult to characterize.