Piezo nanopositioners and piezo scanners for alignment and microscopy provide parallel kinematics up to 6 axes. Additionally these nanopositioning systems provide XY line scan for travel ranges of several 100 microns with repeatability of 1nm within 10 milliseconds, Z scanning with tip/tilt motion and wafer alignment, Z-focusing for confocal microscopy, XY scan for incident detection, and XY dithering for CCD-resolution enhancement.