Hybrid micro-gravity simulator consisting of a high-speed parallel robot

Abstract

In ground testing of a spacecraft system, a simulator system which emulates a micro-gravity environment is necessary. It is demanded that the simulator system has wide response frequency bandwidth when dealing with motions having contacts and collisions. The authors have been developing a hybrid micro-gravity simulator which has a wide response bandwidth. Its motion table is a high-speed parallel robot driven by powerful direct drive motors. In preliminary experiments, this robot has achieved accelerations up to 40 (G). In this paper, we report an outline of the simulator and discuss the experimental results obtained.