A Nitinol Wire Actuated Stewart Platform

Abstract

The Stewart platform is well known parallel robotic mechanism often used as a flight simulator. Less well known applications involve robotics and machine tools. This paper deals with binary actuated robotic Stewart platforms that use Nitinol wire actuators that are switched on and off to control the position of the actuator. Binary control of the six actuators on a platform yields sixty four possible platform positions, and five stacked platforms yield more than a billion possible positions. The design of a simple basic two stage model is described in this paper. 1