Research of Force Sensor-based Control on Flight Simulator Motion Platform

Abstract

Six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) motion platform provides the sense of motion for pilot when the flight simulator is operating. This paper presents a new method of tracking acceleration instead of tracking displacement, while the latter has been widely used. Since the acceleration sensor poor low-frequency characteristics, a new motion platform control method based on force sensor is proposed. By means of the derivation of the dynamics equation, platform acceleration can be obtained indirectly from the force sensor information. Taking RTO (Rejected Takeoff) as an example, in which the washout filter algorithm is designed to access the parameters such as expected acceleration of the motion platform. In addition, a motion platform acceleration controller based on inverse dynamics feedforward control scheme is designed and compared to displacement tracking. Simulation results show that: using the force sensor can achieve the acceleration of the motion platform tracking control, and compared with the conventional displacement control, the acceleration tracking control can significantly improve the tracking accuracy.