A 6-DOF Ship-Borne Antenna Platform With Large Orientation Workspace

Abstract

Compared with traditional antenna platform with two axes, Stewart platform can search airspace with no tracking blind district. And the advantages of high accuracy, high stiffness and high load-weight ratio also make it be a better solution for antenna platforms. This paper designed a 6-DOF ship-borne antenna platform based on the Stewart platform to overcome the difficulties that to realize a large orientation workspace (azimuth range is from 0° to 360°, pitch range is from 0° to 100°) under the compact dimensions of parallel mechanisms. A novel joint structure has been proposed which can provide a larger rotation angle than common Hooke joints to realize the large orientation workspace without the inter-mechanism interference. In addition, this paper defined the concept of working height and working radius then proposed a trajectory based on that to obtain the complete pose (translation and orientation) of antenna platform by azimuth and pitch angles. After that, the particle swarm optimization algorithm is employed to seek the optimal geometrical design parameters. A prototype of the 6-DOF ship-borne antenna platform adopted the particle swarm optimization results has been constructed. And the results show that it not noly meets the design requirements, but also provides a good performance.