Development of the Eclipse-II motion simulator

This paper presents the development of an innovative motion simulator, based on the Eclipse-II mechanism, which is a redundantly actuated parallel kinematic mechanism, with a partially decoupled architecture in its rotational motion. This parallel mechanism can generate six degrees of freedom motion, including continuous rotation through 360 degrees, and translation in any direction. After all verification, such as kinematics, singularity and dynamics analysis, the Eclipse-II one-man ride machine has been manufactured having eight degrees of freedom, and nine axes, by using redundant actuators. It simulates specific motion from the input path produced by a washout filter and motion planning system. The washout filter, which converts the real world motion trajectory to the realizable motion of the simulator, is designed to minimize human sensation error. Also, the motion planning algorithm is designed to choose the specific control inputs from finite candidates, caused by using two additional degrees of freedom of the Eclipse-II mechanism. This motion planning algorithm of the Eclipse-II machine leads to difficulty in achieving real-time control performance due to its structural complexity. This paper finally presents a modified Eclipse-II one-man ride machine, having a partially decoupled architecture in its rotational motion by using the redundant actuators to realize effective real-time control performances.