Tracking control for a Stewart platform prototype

A Stewart platform is a well-known mechanism which can be used for a wide variety of vibration control problems. In this paper, an LQR controller for a Stewart platform prototype is proposed which, combined with proportional derivative gain matrix, achieves a good performance when compared to the classical PID control system. By testing some trajectories, we observe that the tracking error between the actual and pre-established trajectories is smaller when applying the controller designed in this work. The final purpose is not only the implementation of this kind of control to a real Stewart platform constructed at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) by our research group, but its application to other similar parallel robots.