An Active helideck testbed for floating structures based on a Stewart-Gough platform

Abstract

A parallel robot testbed based on Stewart-Gough platform called Active-helideck is designed, developed and tested as a helicopter floating helideck. The objective of this testbed is to show the advantages of helicopters that use an active helideck upon landing on and taking off from ships or from offshore structures. Active-helideck compensates simulated movements of a ship at sea. The main goal of this study is to maintain the robot’s end effector (helideck) in a quasi-static position in accordance to an absolute inertial frame. Compensation is carried out through the coordinate action of its six prismatic actuators in function of an inertial measurement unit. Moreover, the simulation of the sea movement is done by a parallel robot called ship platform with three degrees of freedom. The ship platform is built with a vertical oscillation along the z axis, i.e. heave, and rotates on remaining axes, i.e. roll and pitch. Active helideck is able to compensate simulated movements by considering the ship as an inertial frame as observed in the experiment