A vibration isolation table supported by a redundant number of pneumatic actuators and force redistribution for compensating broken actuators

This paper proposes a force redistribution method to compensate for actuator breakdowns on active vibration-isolation tables. The vibration-isolation table is supported by eight pneumatic actuators, and has a redundant number of actuators with respect to the degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the table´s motion. When some of the actuators break down, their output forces are re-distributed on the unbroken actuators by the proposed force redistribution method, which takes advantage of the actuators´ redundancy to compensate the breakdowns of the actuators and to recover the stability of the closed-loop system. The effectiveness of the proposed method is examined by numerical simulations.