An effective strategy of real-time vision-based control for a Stewart platform

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksA Stewart platform is a kind of parallel robot which can be used for a wide variety of technological and industrial applications. In this paper, a Stewart platform designed and assembled at the Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya (UPC) by our research group is presented. The main objective is to overcome the enormous difficulties that arise when a real-time vision-based control of a fast moving object placed on these mechanisms is required. In addition, a description of its geometric characteristics, the calibration process, together with an illustrative experiment to demonstrate the good behavior of the platform is given.Postprint (author's final draft

New geometric approaches to the analysis and design of Stewart-Gough platforms

In general, rearranging the legs of a Stewart-Gough platform, i.e., changing the locations of its leg attachments, modifies the platform singularity locus in a rather unexpected way. Nevertheless, some leg rearrangements have been recently found to leave singularities invariant. Identification of such rearrangements is useful not only for the kinematic analysis of the platforms, but also as a tool to redesign manipulators avoiding the implementation of multiple spherical joints, which are difficult to construct and have a small motion range. In this study, a summary of these singularity-invariant leg rearrangements is presented, and their practical implications are illustrated with several examples including well-known architectures.The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Generalitat de Catalunya through the Robotics group (SRG0155).Peer Reviewe

Motion planning of a climbing parallel robot

This paper proposes a novel application of the Stewart–Gough parallel platform as a climbing robot and its kinematics control to climb through long structures describing unknown spatial trajectories, such as palm trunks, tubes, etc. First, the description and design of the climbing parallel robot is presented. Second, the inverse and forward kinematics analysis of a mobile six-degrees-of-freedom parallel robot is described, based on spatial constraint formulation. Finally, the gait pattern and the climbing strategy of the parallel robot is described. The information from this research is being used in an actual climbing parallel robot design at Miguel Hernández University of Elche (Alicante), Spain.This paper was recommended for publication by Associate Editor M. Shoham and Editor I. Walker upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture under Project 1FD1997-1338

Future Astronomical Observatories on the Moon

Papers at a workshop which consider the topic astronomical observations from a lunar base are presented. In part 1, the rationale for performing astronomy on the Moon is established and economic factors are considered. Part 2 includes concepts for individual lunar based telescopes at the shortest X-ray and gamma ray wavelengths, for high energy cosmic rays, and at optical and infrared wavelengths. Lunar radio frequency telescopes are considered in part 3, and engineering considerations for lunar base observatories are discussed in part 4. Throughout, advantages and disadvantages of lunar basing compared to terrestrial and orbital basing of observatories are weighted. The participants concluded that the Moon is very possibly the best location within the inner solar system from which to perform front-line astronomical research

CABLE-SUSPENDED CPR-D TYPE PARALLEL ROBOT

This paper deals with the analysis and synthesis of a newly selected Cable-suspended Parallel Robot configuration, named CPR-D system. The camera carrier workspace has the shape of a parallelepiped. The CPR-D system has a unique Jacobian matrix that maps the relationship between internal and external coordinates. This geometric relationship is a key solution for the definition of the system kinematic and dynamic models. Because of the CPR-D system complexity, the Lagrange principle of virtual work has been adapted. Two significant Examples have been used for the CPR-D system analysis and validation

High performance control of a multiple-DOF motion platform for driver seat vibration test in laboratory

Dynamic testing plays an important part in the vehicle seat suspension study. However, a large amount of research work on vibration control of vehicle seat suspension to date has been limited to simulations because the use of a full-size vehicle to test the device is an expensive and dangerous task. In order to decrease the product development time and cost as well as to improve the design quality, in this research, a vibration generation platform is developed for simulating the road induced vehicle vibration in laboratory. Different from existing driving simulation platforms, this research focuses on the vehicle chassis vibration simulation and the control of motion platform to make sure the platform can more accurately generate the actual vehicle vibration movement. A seven degree-of-freedom (DOF) full-vehicle model with varying road inputs is used to simulate the real vehicle vibration. Moreover, because the output vibration data of the vehicle model is all about the absolute heave, pitch and roll velocities of the sprung mass, in order to simulate the vibration in all dimensions, a Stewart multiple-DOF motion platform is designed to generate the required vibration. As a result, the whole vibration simulator becomes a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) system. The hardware consists of a computer used to calculate the required vibration signals, a Stewart platform used to generate the real movement, and a controller used to control the movement of the platform and implemented by a National Instruments (NI) CompactRIO board. The data, which is from the vehicle model, can be converted into the length of the six legs of the Stewart platform. Therefore, the platform can transfer into the same posture as the real vehicle chassis at that moment. The success of the developed platform is demonstrated by HIL experiments of actuators. As there are six actuators installed in the motion platform, the signals from six encoders are used as the feedback signals for the control of the length of the actuators, and advanced control strategies are developed to control the movement of the platform to make sure the platform can accurately generate the required motion even in heavy load situations. Theoretical study is conducted on how to generate the reasonable vibration signals suitable for vehicle seat vibration tests in different situations and how to develop advanced control strategies for accurate control of the motion platform. Both simulation and experimental studies are conducted to validate the proposed approaches

A lunar far-side very low frequency array

Papers were presented to consider very low frequency (VLF) radio astronomical observations from the moon. In part 1, the environment in which a lunar VLF radio array would function is described. Part 2 is a review of previous and proposed low-frequency observatories. The science that could be conducted with a lunar VLF array is described in part 3. The design of a lunar VLF array and site selection criteria are considered, respectively, in parts 4 and 5. Part 6 is a proposal for precursor lunar VLF observations. Finally, part 7 is a summary and statement of conclusions, with suggestions for future science and engineering studies. The workshop concluded with a general consensus on the scientific goals and preliminary design for a lunar VLF array

Design of a self-adjusting antenna feed for a homologous designed tiltable 20m-radio-telescope

Radioteleskope sind verschiedenartigen Umwelteinflüssen ausgesetzt. Dadurch hervorgerufene Verformungen der Reflektoroberfläche verändern deren geometrischen Eigenschaften und können die ursprüngliche Position und Form des Brennpunkts verändern. Eine Abweichung dieses Brennpunkt von der Lage der Primärantenne beeinflusst die Leistungsfähigkeit des Teleskops. Die vorliegende Arbeit zeigt eine Methode zur theoretischen Abschätzung der Verformung durch das Eigengewicht des Reflektors des INRAS RT–20. Jene nach der Idee des homologen Designs von Hoerners konstruierten Teleskopen weisen eine Stützstruktur auf, die die Reflektorfläche unabhängig vom Elevationswinkel in einer der ursprünglichen Form ähnlichen Gestalt halten. Somit kann die Verformung durch das Nachführen der Primärantenne ausgeglichen werden. Grundlage der Untersuchung ist ein vorhandenes Strukturmodell des RT–20–Teleskops. Zusammen mit den zugehörigen Geometriedaten und Materialparameten wird ein Finite-Element-Modell erstellt. Für dieses wird ein Belastungsfall mit dem Eigengewicht für verschiedene Elevationswinkel simuliert. Um die deformierte Reflektorfläche mathematisch zubeschreiben und den passenden Brennpunkt zu bestimmen wird eine parametrisierte Form eines Best-Fit-Paraboloids erörtert. Für die Ermittlung der Parameter werden drei Optimierungsalgorithmen in Matlab ausgeführt und miteinander verglichen. Daraus wird die Verschiebung des Brennpunkts (Defokussierung) ermittelt und der Bedarf einer Korrekturbewegung für die Primärantenne abgeschätzt. In einem Entwurfsprozess werden nach den Ideen der VDI2221–Norm technische Prinzipe für ein Aktuierungssystem entwickelt und bezüglich ausgewählter Kriterien gegeneinander abgewogen. Als Resultat dieses Bewertungsprozesses wird eines der Prinzipe erwählt und spezifiziert. Für die spätere Umsetzung werden Komponenten vorgeschlagen, Bauteile vorbereitend konstruiert und in einer CAD–Software zu einer funktionierenden Baugruppe zusammengefügt.Radio telescopes are exposed to various environmental conditions. These can produce deformations of the reflector surface that will have impact on its paraboloidal characteristics determining the position and shape of the focal point. A misalignment between the reflector focal point and the radiation–receiving primary antenna influences the performance of the telescope. The actual work presents a method to estimate theoretically the dead–weight induced deformation of the reflector surface for the INRAS PUCP RT–20 radio telescope. Such homologous designed telescopes consist of a backing structure supporting the reflector surface to retain a shape familiar to the original one and independent of the elevation angle. So it is possible to compensate the deformation by the adjustment of the primary antenna. The analysis of the deformation is done for an existing structural model of the RT–20. This model is meshed with the corresponding geometrical and material properties. In a finite–element software the load situation due to the telescope’s dead weight is simulated for different elevation angles. To describe the deformed reflector surface in a mathematical way an expression for a parametrized best-fitting paraboloid is derived. To determine the fit-parameters for the discrete point set, three optimization algorithms are executed in Matlab and their results compared. Based on this, the need of a re-alignment of the primary antenna is demonstrated. Thereupon a design process for an actuation system intended for the corrective movement is performed, following the ideas of the VDI2221–norm. Several mechanical concepts are presented and evaluated in relation to their suitability for the main needs. Based on this assessment, a parallel–kinematic mechanism is chosen as the most convenient concept. This is examined in more detail, including a deviation for the inverse kinematics. For this concept, a preliminary selection of specific components is done and assembled in a CAD–prototype.Tesi

Report on active and planned spacecraft and experiments

Information is presented, concerning active and planned spacecraft and experiments known to the National Space Science Data Center. The information included a wide range of disciplines: astronomy, earth sciences, meteorology, planetary sciences, aeronomy, particles and fields, solar physics, life sciences, and material sciences. These spacecraft projects represented the efforts and funding of individual countries as well as cooperative arrangements among different countries