Development of a pneumatically driven flight simulator Stewart platform using motion and force control

In this paper we develop a motion platform driven by pneumatic actuators for a flight simulator. The platform itself is a Stewart platform with an extra cylinder in the middle. To control the platform two control methods are proposed, with the benefit of eliminating the kinematic constraints caused by the seven-cylinders configuration. The six outer cylinders are controlled according to motion trajectories whereas the middle cylinder acts as a pure force actuator to lift the weight of the platform. The Immersion and Invariance method with an additional friction compensator is applied for motion control. The method of exact input/output linearization is used for controlling the lift force of the middle cylinder. The measurement results show that the proposed method is effective for controlling the platform.