Development of a straightness measuring system and compensation technique using multiple corner cubes for precision stages

Abstract At present, the accuracy of precision manufacture is most affected by straightness errors, so the measurement and compensation of these errors are very important. In the current paper, three measurement systems for straightness are presented; they are characterized by simple set-up, online measuring, low cost, and sub-micrometre accuracy achieving 0.2 μm. Experimental results show that these three measurement systems can be applied to implement a compensation system which comprises one among them, an Elmo controller, and a dSPACE controller, and accomplish static compensation and dynamic compensation in the dual linear-axis stage. The accuracies of the static and dynamic compensation achieve ± 1 μm and ± 2.5 μm, respectively.