System errors should be removed to improve the precision of a precise positioning stage because of their influence to affection the precision. As a mean of effective and lowly-costing compensation

the reverse compensation could be mainly used to eliminate the errors. According the principle of the reverse compensation

the error curve of a stage is reversed to match negatively the original one that was measured and drawn before

so that the largest proportion of error

which is just the system error

could be separated and removed. The positioning stage described in this paper has a 2-layer structure

in which the lower is macro-stage and the upper is micro-one. The macro-stage is driven by precision ball lead-screw and positioned by optical grating. And the micro-stage is driven by PZT and uses an inductance as sensor. The positioning precision of the macro-stage is measured as 17.4μm before compensation

which is

obviously

too big to conform to the requirements of micro-stage’s moving. The precision is improved to 1.3μm after using the principle described above

then the macro-stage satisfies the need of precision positioning. As the same

the precision of micro-stage is improved from 137.6nm to 22.2nm

which accomplishes nano-scale positioning successfully. The experiment shows that the reverse compensation is effective to eliminate the system errors

and on the other hand

it also shows that the method is not very good at removing the random errors because it is impossible to find the reverse curve to match.