Abstract
The stewart platform manipulator proposed by stewart is the parallel manipulator which is composed of several independent actuators connecting the upper plate with the base plate and capable of executing a six degree of freedom motion. The manipulator has a structure of a closed loop form, and provides better load-to-weight ratio and ratio and rigidity than a serial manipulator with an open loop form. Moreover, the manipulator has high positional accuracy because position errors of actuators are not additive. Because of these advantages, this manipulator is widely used in many engineering applications such as a driving simulator, a tool of machining center, a force/torque sensor and so on. When this Stewart platform manipulator is controlled in joint space, it is difficult to design a controller using an analytic method due to nonhnearity and unknown parameters of actuators. Therefore, a PID controller is often used because of easiness in applications. To find the PID control gain, a trial-and-error method is generally used. This method is time-consuming, and does not guarantee a optimal gain. Thus, this paper proposes a GA-PID controller which selects an optimal PID control gain using genetic algorithms. And this proposed controller is evaluated experimentally and shows acceptable performance.
