This paper is concentrated on control system design for an XY parallel micromanipulator with piezoelectric actuation. The decoupled property of the manipulator enables the employment of single-input-single-output controllers for the two working axes. To compensate for nonlinear hysteresis effect stemming from piezoelectric actuator, the dynamics with Bouc-Wen hysteresis model is derived and identified for the system. Afterwards, a real-time fuzzy sliding mode control with perturbation estimation (FSMCPE) along with fuzzy switching control is proposed to attenuate the chattering phenomenon. Experimental studies reveal that the designed FSMCPE is superior to conventional SMCPE in terms of both positioning and tracking performances of the micromanip-ulator system, which validates the effectiveness of the presented control system design as well. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.