Control of a Stewart Platform Using a MIMO PID Controller

In this article, we focus on the control of a 6-degree-of-freedom Stewart platform. To achieve this, we consider the use of a full MIMO PID control, enhanced by a feedforward loop from the reference input. Our goal is to evaluate, through simulations, the advantages of using the full MIMO PID controller in contrast to two decentralized MIMO PID versions. Our results show that, in general, the performance of the control loop is better for the full MIMO PID controller than the decentralized versions, as expected. However, in some cases, the difference is not significant, which would make decentralized control preferable in those specific cases due to its simplicity of implementation.