Design of a Pneumatic Weight Compensation System for the FUM Stewart Robot

Stewart robots are among the most favorable platforms used by motion simulation industry. The majorly of the existing industrial motion simulators use hydraulic actuators due to the heavy cabin load. There exists a significant effort by the manufactures to replace the difficult to maintain hydraulic actuator with their electric counterparts. This change results in significant lowering of the required maintenance. However, the electric actuators, in general, lack the force capabilities of their hydraulic counterparts. To overcome this limitation and increase the electric simulator gross moving load, pneumatic counter weight system is added to the existing robot structure. In this paper, the early results of adding the pneumatic cylinders to the commercial FUM Stewart simulator, is presented.