Development of 6-DOF motion simulator for firing control system testing

The hydraulically driven 6-DOF parallel Gough-Stewart mechanism was used as a motion simulator to simulate the real motions of carrier for testing firing control systems in laboratory. The bidirectional force/torque versus velocity interactions between mechanical dynamics system and its hydraulic driving system was explored to establish an integrated dynamic model. Then the couplings of pose outputs were presented and experimental results show that the couplings between these outputs will become more intense with the increase of motion frequency within natural frequency of the Gough-Stewart mechanism. Moreover, for the safety of the motion simulator, a simple criterion which only uses the lengths of legs instead of complicated and time-consuming method of condition number of Jacobian is proposed to distinguish singular area from the workspace. Amplitude and Phase Control (APC) and random wave duplication techniques were employed to greatly improve the simulation fidelity not only for sine waveform but for random waveform as well.