AN INTELLIGENT CONTROL-SYSTEM FOR MULTIPLE DEGREE-OF-FREEDOM VIBRATION ISOLATION

Multiple degree-of-freedom (DOF) vibration isolation and suppression c apabilities are essential for precision control of a wide range of spa ce-borne structures as well as earth-based systems. This paper present s the system design and implementation, control algorithms, parallel c omputing architecture, and real-time experiments of a six DOF Hexapod Active Vibration Isolation (HAVI) system developed at Intelligent Auto mation, Inc. The system design of the HAVI is based on the hexapod (St ewart Platform) concept. A novel geometric arrangement of a hexapod, c alled the ''Cubic Configuration'' is used. Magnetostrictive material T erfenol-D actuators are employed. A two-layer control system architect ure incorporating local force feedback control and a robust adaptive f ilter control for active vibration isolation are employed. A high perf ormance parallel computation engine MDSP-100 with multiple DSP process ors and maximum 566 MFLOPs throughput is also developed for the HAVI a pplications and was used to implement proposed control algorithms. The unique architecture and functionality of the MDSP-100 facilitate the data acquisition and control law computation operations in a parallel computing fashion. Mechanical hardware for the HAVI system has been fa bricated and tested. The six channel simultaneous active vibration con trol experiments were performed to demonstrate HAVI system's 6 DOF vib ration isolation and suppression capabilities. A wide band (below 250 Hz) active vibration attenuation for all six channels was obtained in the real-time experiments.