364 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO.
3, MAY 2004
Disturbance-Rejection High-Precision Motion
Control of a Stewart Platform
Y. X. Su, Member, IEEE, B. Y. Duan, C. H. Zheng, Y. F. Zhang, G. D. Chen, and J. W. Mi
Abstract—A simple robust autodisturbance rejection controller
(ADRC) in linkspace is proposed to realize high precision tracking
control of a general 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) Stewart platform
in this paper. In practice, the performance of the controlled system
is limited by how to select the high-quality differential signal in
the presence of disturbances and measurement noise. Moreover,
unmodeled nonlinear friction provides degradation on the motion
precision. So, a nonlinear tracking differentiator in the feedfor-
ward path and an extended states observer in the feedback path
are designed to obtain high quality differential signal and the real
action component of unknown disturbance signals including non-
linear friction without a precise mathematical model. The non-
linear PD (proportional derivative) controller is used to synthesize
the control action to give a superior performance. Extensive simu-
lations and experimental results are presented to verify the effec-
tiveness and ease of engineering implementation of the proposed
method. The developed ADRC controller is simple and directly in-
tuitive to the practitioners.
Index Terms—Nonlinear control, observer, parallel manipula-
tors, state estimation, tracking control, tracking filters.
I. INTRODUCTION
S INCE Stewart developed a prototype of 6 degrees of
freedom (DOF) parallel manipulator in 1965, this parallel
manipulator has attracted tremendous attention from re-
searchers involving robot manipulators, robotic end-effectors,
and robotic devices for high-precision robotic tasks where the
requirements of accuracy and sturdiness are more essential
than those of large workspace and maneuverability [1]–[5]. A
typical 6 DOF parallel manipulator-Stewart platform, as shown
in Fig. 1, consists of six variable-length actuators connecting a
mobile plate to a base plate with spherical joint and universal
joint, respectively. Motion of the mobile plate with respect
to the base plate is produced by shortening or extending the
actuator lengths, and the proper coordination of the actuator
length trajectories enables the mobile plate to track the complex
trajectory with high accuracy.
Merlet [2] conducted a systematic study of an in-parallel-
actuated robot involving kinematics, dynamics, workspace,
singularity and control. Kim et al. [3] designed a redundantly
actuated parallel mechanism for rapid machining. Su and
Manuscript received May 13, 2002; revised December 30, 2002. Manuscript
received in final form May 15, 2003. Recommended by Associate Editor D. W.
Repperger. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science
Foundation under Grant 50075065, the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi
Province under Grant 2000C22, and Robot Laboratory in Shenyang Institute of
Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant RL200104.
The authors are with the School of Electro-Mechanical Engineering,
Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China (e-mail: yxsu@mail.xidian.edu.cn;
byduan@xidian.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCST.2004.824315
1063-6536/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
Fig. 1. Typical Stewart platform.
Duan [4] developed a 6 DOF parallel manipulator serving
as a fine-tuning platform for the feed tracking for the square
kilometer array (SKA) and obtained the optimal kinematically
structural parameters using genetic algorithms [5].
A robot control scheme stems from two frameworks. One is
to design a control on the workspace and the other is on the
linkspace. The linkspace control is a conventional control, and
is a kind of tracking control to follow the desired link length
computed from the position command of the mobile plate by in-
verse kinematics. Normally, most controllers in applications are
based on the linkspace coordinates, which they consider only an
approximated manipulator model [2], [6]. On the contrary, the
workspace control implies that the control is designed based on
the dynamics expressed by the workspace coordinates. How-
ever, the control based on the workspace coordinates needs in-
formation of a 6 DOF sensor to measure the displacement or ve-
locity of the mobile plate. Otherwise, it needs direct kinematics
commands which rely on the numerical method or observer de-
sign to estimate the 6 DOF information. It is well known that
the direct kinematics of a parallel manipulator have always been
a difficult and challenging problem [2], [7], [8]. Hence, the
workspace control for parallel manipulator is seldom used in
practice [2], [6].
Considering a control aspect, a classical PID (proportional
integral derivative) control has been employed in industry but
it does not always guarantee a high performance for a parallel
manipulator. Thus, a sophisticated control scheme is required
for an enhanced control performance [6], [9], [10]. However,
the geometry, high nonlinearity, and uncertainty prevent a gen-
uine control algorithm from being developed compared to a se-
rial manipulator [6]. In practice, a conventional PID control ap-
pending some new modern control methods is still the main
scheme to enhance the trajectory tracking precision of a parallel
manipulator, just as done in [9].
Moreover, unmodeled friction has been found to have
unwanted influence on performance of the controlled system
[11]–[16]. Usually, a model-based approach is employed
SU et al.: DISTURBANCE-REJECTION HIGH-PRECISION MOTION CONTROL OF A STEWART PLATFORM 365

to reduce the effect from friction. Even in adaptive control

of servo systems, an initial friction model is also crucial to
ensure smooth control signals and rapid parameter convergence
[14]. However, under practical conditions, because of the
inherent nonlinearity of friction, precise friction modeling has
always been a difficult and challenging problem [11]–[16].
Other efforts have been made toward more advanced control
of precision motion systems. Otten et al. [15] proposed a
neural-network based feedforward assisted PID controller to
realize high precision motion control of a linear motor. Wang
et al. [16] developed a new well-trained neural-network-based
friction model to self-tune the PI controller with suitable
gain according to each operating condition for precise motion
control of a permanent-magnet synchronous ac motor. These
methods need an explicit system model for the control design,
and the performance achievable depends on the accuracy of the
model. Fig. 2. Prototype of 6 DOF Stewart platform.
The conventional PID controller is a widely used industrial
controller which provides a combination of proportional, inte- The inertial frame - - and moving frame - - are
gral, and derivative action on the control error to form the output fixed on the base plate and mobile plate, respectively, with their
of the controller [17]. It is known that a linear combination of origins at the centers of the two circulars, as shown in Fig. 1.
these components can achieve a compromised performance in The coordinates of the joints and on the base plate and
terms of system response speed and stability. A nonlinear com- mobile plate are defined as and , separately. According to
bination can provide additional degrees of freedom to achieve a coordinate transformation, the coordinates of with respect to
much improved system performance [18]–[21]. the inertial frame can be expressed as
In this paper, a robust auto disturbance rejection controller
(ADRC) is designed in linkspace to implement high precision (1)
tracking of a general 6 DOF Stewart platform. The ADRC uses a
nonlinear tracking differentiator (TD) to yield a high quality dif- in which, denotes the orientation matrix, which can be repre-
ferential signal in the presence of disturbances and measurement sented by the following three angles with respect to the
noise in the feedforward path, and an extended states observer -axis, -axis, and -axis of the inertial frame, separately
(ESO) to provide the system’s state and the real action com- [5]
ponent of the unknown disturbances including nonlinear fric-
tion in the feedback path. The nonlinear PD (N-PD) scheme is
used to synthesize the control action. The design is carried on
directly in discrete-time and the structure chosen for the realiza-
tion permits fast computation and avoids parameter sensitivity
problems. Second, feedforward TD is motivated by difficulties where the symbols and denote and .
posed by lower-order reference trajectories which are quantized According to geometrical relationship, the vector of the actu-
at the sensor resolution [22]. The ESO serves as a soft sensor of ator can be written as
general unknown disturbances arising in the control system.
(2)
The organization of this paper is as follows. The kinematic
model of a general 6 DOF Stewart platform is developed in
in which, denotes the position vector of the inertial origin to
Section II. The design of ADRC is presented in details in Sec-
the moving origin, is the length of the th actuator, and is
tion III, with extensive simulations to validate its effectiveness.
the unit vector along this actuator.
The experimental results are presented in Section IV. Finally,
So, if the pose of the mobile plate with respect to the base
some concluding remarks are summarized in Section V.
plate is given, the appropriate length of the actuator can be cal-
culated by the above formulas, and then the six extendable actu-
II. KINEMATIC MODEL ators can be driven through certain favorable control algorithms
to realize the trajectory tracking.
The prototype of a general 6 DOF Stewart platform is shown
in Fig. 2. It is consisted of an upward base plate, a mobile plate,
III. ADRC DESIGN
and six extendable actuators. The actuators are connected to the
base plate and mobile plate with a universal joint and a spherical In practice, the performance of the controlled system is lim-
joint, respectively. The actuator is driven by an ac servomotor, ited by how to select the differential signal out of the noncontin-
and the perfect coordination of the actuator length trajectory uous measured signal with stochastic noise. In most cases, the
enables the mobile plate to track the complex trajectory with differential signal (velocity) is usually obtained by the backward
high precision. difference of the given signal (position), which is very noisy and
366 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 3, MAY 2004
Fig. 3. Schematic diagram of ADRC.
limits the overall performance [23]. In a PID controller, deriva-
tive action provides a degree of predictive control capability
to yield faster response without an excessive overshoot/under-
shoot, but its practical merits are often questionable. In the pres-
ence of measurement noise or rapidly changing disturbance sig-
nals, it is unclear as to whether derivative action will give any
control improvement. In some cases, a first-order filter is used
in conjunction with the differentiator. In other cases, derivative
action may just be switched off together [14].
In this section, a nonlinear tracking differentiator (TD) [24] in
the feedforward path is used to replace the differential compo-
nent of the conventional PID controller for more effective and
robust performance in the presence of noise and other distur-
bances. An extended states observer (ESO) [25] in the feedback
path is developed to act as a soft sensor of general unknown
disturbance signals arising in the control system. So, a feedfor-
ward control action may then be taken in response to the un-
known disturbance before they degrade the system performance.
The concepts behind the TD and ESO have been proposed in a
general empirical form [24]–[26]. Although a rigorous stability
analysis has not been available, the viability for practical appli-
cations has been demonstrated via simulation and experiments
[14], [26]–[29].
The schematic diagram of ADRC is shown in Fig. 3. It is
comprised of a TD in the feedforward path, and an ESO and a
N-PD synthesizer in the feedback path. The design is carried on
directly in discrete-time and the structure chosen for the realiza-
tion permits fast computation and avoids parameter sensitivity
problems.
A. TD Design
The discrete form of the reference signals and of the
proposed TD in the feedforward path can be expressed as the
following [26]:
(3)
where is the sampling step, and is a velocity factor that
determine the transition. The function denotes
(4)
in which, denotes a sign function, and and can be
determined as follows:
(5)
with
(6)
For any bounded integrable function , the system described
by (3) can be used as a high performance tracking differentiator
of the reference signal , that is,
[26].
The performance of TD is shown in Fig. 4. The reference
input is , and it is perturbed by an additive white
noise component with the maximum amplitude of 0.01. For the
comparison, the differential signals obtained, respectively, by
the developed TD and the general backward difference method
are shown in this figure. The simulations were programmed in
Matlab and run on a PC Celeron-433. The simulation step is
determined as , and the initial value of and is
and . It can be seen that the differential
tracking performance of TD is much better compared to that of
the conventional backward difference method.
B. ESO Design
In recent years, due to the great advances in nonlinear con-
trol theory, the observer-based controller has become one of the
most commonly used schemes in industrial applications. The
ESO is proposed to estimate the system’s state and the external
disturbance, which offers several attractive features [22]. In the
absence of large model errors, it allows independent tuning of
disturbance rejection characteristics and command following
characteristics. Further, compared to integral action, ESO al-
lows more flexibility via the selection of the order, relative de-
gree, and bandwidth of low-pass filtering. Although the tech-
nique of appending disturbance states to a traditional state es-
timator to construct an ESO is well known [22], using the idea
developed by Han [25] to design a ESO allows a simple and
intuitive tuning of the disturbance observer loop gains indepen-
dent on the state feedback gains.
Consider a discrete uncertain nonlinear system with unknown
external disturbance
(7)
where is an unknown function, and
is the bounded unknown external disturbance. The
SU et al.: DISTURBANCE-REJECTION HIGH-PRECISION MOTION CONTROL OF A STEWART PLATFORM 367

Fig. 5. Performance of the third-order ESO.

, and are design parameters to be

determined. The function can be defined as
Fig. 4. Comparison of TD and general differentiator.
(9)
th-order ESO for this system only using the measure-
ment output of the system , can be described as shown in To validate the effectiveness of ESO, the simulation of a dis-
(8) crete disturbed nonlinear system is carried out, which can be
described as

(10)

.. where is a bounded unknown disturbance, which is assumed to

. be expressed as . For this second-order
control system, the third-order ESO can be expressed as shown
in (11)
(8)

where are the estimated system’s state, that is,

is the estimated real
action component of the bounded unknown disturbances, (11)
368 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 3, MAY 2004

Fig. 6. Hardware configuration of the Stewart platform.

The initial value of , and are determined as: TABLE I

, and . The simulations were programmed SYSTEM PARAMETERS
in Matlab with a fourth-order Runge–Kutta and run on a PC
Celeron-433. The output of ESO , and and the output
, and of the system are shown in Fig. 5. It can be seen that
the system’s state and the real action component of the unknown
disturbance can be estimated precisely by the designed third-
order ESO. The simulations have validated that the ESO has
great versatility and robustness for a class of nonlinear system.
There is no tracking degradation with the variation of the param-
eters by 50% [25]. For the third-order ESO, one feasible choice
of the parameters is determined as follows:
.

C. N-PD and Disturbance Compensation

TABLE II
Once obtained the high-quality differential signal and the es- PARAMETERS FOR ADRC
timated state, the essential elements in classical PD can be re-
placed by the following two components:

(12)

Therefore, the control action of this N-PD can be used to syn-

thesize the preliminary control action, which can be described
as [21]
(13)
where , and are design parameters to be de-
termined.
Taking the feedforward control action to cancel out the un-
known external disturbance before they degrade the system per-
formance, the total control action of ADRC can be expressed as
[27]

(14)
and represent the radii of the base plate and mobile plate, re-
where is a preset constant.
spectively. stands for the splaying angle between the adjacent
Empirically, the design parameters may be determined ac-
joints on the base plate and mobile plate, respectively, repre-
cording to the following guidelines: –
sents the angle between the center of the two pair joints, and
– , and can be adjusted using the many
is the initial vertical distance of the two plates while they are
PD tuning rules available for linear PD control.
parallel and symmetrical. This parallel manipulator was initial
designed to serve as a virtual-axis machining tool [30]. At the
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS present stage, it is temporarily used as the fine tuning platform
The prototype of the experiment is shown in Fig. 2. The struc- of the feed tracking system for the scaled model experiment of
tural parameters can be listed as follows. mm, the SKA [29]. The modified hardware configuration of this con-
mm, , and mm, in which trol system is shown in Fig. 6. PCL-726 is a six-channel D/A
SU et al.: DISTURBANCE-REJECTION HIGH-PRECISION MOTION CONTROL OF A STEWART PLATFORM
Fig. 7. Experimental result of a step command.
Fig. 8. Experimental result of a sinusoidal command.
output card, PCL-833 is a three-axis quadrature encoder card,
and HY-6220 is a timer to provide external interrupt signal and
sampling. The extendable actuator is comprised of an AC ser-
vomotor & drive unit, compliant timing belt and screwball. The
servomotor and driver used is Panasonic Minas A series (low in-
ertial moment) MSM042A1F AC servomotor and the matching
driver. The ADRC algorithms were implemented in C on an
Advantech industrial computer with a Pentium-233. Due to the
limitation of the serial-port communication in the future experi-
369
ments of the coarse-fine cooperation control of the feed tracking
system for the scaled model experiment [4], [5], [29], at present,
the sampling period is determined as ms.
The systematic parameters for this control system are listed
in Table I.
After several tests, the parameters of the ADRC for this ap-
plication are determined as shown in Table II.
In order to verify the effectiveness of the developed ADRC,
the following experiments are carried out. Because of the high
370
Fig. 9. Experimental result of a low slope command.
Fig. 10. Experimental result of a step command by 25% variation of the controller parameters.
Fig. 11. Length increment and tracking error of the first actuator.
robustness of ADRC and the same selected servomotor systems,
the parameters for all the six extendable actuators are deter-
mined as identical primarily, and then make the necessary small
tuning according to the respective experimental results. So, the
first test examines the tracking performance of one of the ex-
tendable actuators for a step command and a periodical sinu-
soidal signal, as shown in Figs. 7 and 8, respectively. It can be
seen that the error is significant only in the transition period with
a fast convergence and no overshoot. The steady-state tracking
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 3, MAY 2004
error for mm is less than mm. The
large tracking error results from the sampling period of
ms, which is large compared to the time constant of the used
servomotor. For this reason, the peak current has been lowered
to 1 A in order to reduce the motor speed. The tracking error is
expected to be lower with the reduction of the sampling period
or tracking a low velocity signal, just as shown in Fig. 8(b) for
mm. The tracking error is less than mm.
The result is quite favorable.
SU et al.: DISTURBANCE-REJECTION HIGH-PRECISION MOTION CONTROL OF A STEWART PLATFORM
Fig. 12. Length increment and tracking error of the second actuator.
Fig. 13. Length increment and tracking error of the third actuator.
Fig. 14. Length increment and tracking error of the fourth actuator.
To address the effectiveness of friction compensation, the
third experiment of the tracking performance to a low slope
command is carried out. Friction, being the dominant, error-in-
ducing nonlinearity, will make the dominant contribution to the
tracking with low velocity [18]. The experimental results are
shown in Fig. 9. It can be seen that the tracking error is only
mm, which is a superior performance for low velocity.
To test the performance robustness of the developed ADRC,
the tracking performance of the same extendable actuator as the
first test for a step command is concerned, with 25% increased
371
variation of the above selected parameters. The experimental
result is shown in Fig. 10.
Compared Figs. 7 and 10, it can be seen that the tracking per-
formance is no degradation with the variation of the selected
parameters by 25%. The developed ADRC has high robustness
to the variation of the parameters, which makes it is very con-
venient to apply in practice.
After the above experiments of one of the extendable actua-
tors, the Stewart platform is reassembled together, and the mo-
bile plate is desired to track an - planar circle with the radius
372
Fig. 15. Length increment and tracking error of the fifth actuator.
Fig. 16. Length increment and tracking error of the sixth actuator.
Fig. 17. Trajectory of the X -Y planar circle.
of 12 cm at the linear velocity of 17 mm/s. The length increment
of the actuators and its tracking error is shown in Figs. 11–16,
respectively. With the measurement of the center of the mobile
plate using Leica TC1101 total station [29], [31], the tracking
of the mobile plate is shown in Fig. 17. The tracking errors of
position in coordinates is shown in Fig. 18.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 12, NO. 3, MAY 2004
It can be seen that, once entered into the steady tracking, the
tracking error of the actuator is less than mm, and the
tracking errors in coordinates are less than mm.
From the above experimental results, it may be concluded
that high tracking precision can be achieved. Furthermore, the
ADRC controller has high robustness with the variation in the
range of 25% of the selected parameters.
V. CONCLUSION
A high robust ADRC controller in linkspace is proposed to re-
alize the high precision trajectory tracking of a general 6 DOF
Stewart platform. The ADRC uses a nonlinear tracking differen-
tiator (TD) to yield a high-quality differential signal in the pres-
ence of disturbances and measurement noise in the feedforward
path, and an ESO in the feedback path to serve as a soft sensor
of general unknown disturbances arising in the control system,
including nonlinear friction. The N-PD scheme is used to syn-
thesize the control action. This design is carried on directly in
discrete-time and the structure chosen for the realization per-
mits fast computation and avoids parameter sensitivity prob-
lems. The experimental results show that high precision tracking
for a general 6 DOF Stewart platform can be guaranteed. Fur-
thermore, minor prior knowledge of the system is required; the
ADRC controller can be applied to other servo system requiring
SU et al.: DISTURBANCE-REJECTION HIGH-PRECISION MOTION CONTROL OF A STEWART PLATFORM
Fig. 18. Position errors in X; Y coordinates.
high tracking precision. Above all, the structure of the controller
is simple and directly intuitive to the practitioners.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to
Prof. J. Q. Han at Academy of Mathematics and System Sci-
ences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, for his excellent
guidance and detailed helps in the determination of the param-
eters of the controller. They would also like to thank Prof. H. S.
Ding, Dr. J. Hao, and Ph.D. candidates C. G. Li, J. Q. Li, and
T. Fu at Beijing Institute of Technology, for their help in the
experiment. Also, they would like to express their appreciation
to Prof. Y. Zheng, Prof. Z. G. Xia and Master candidate Y. B.
Luo for their help in the measurement of the experiments. They
are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for the numerous
comments and suggestions, which have lead to significant im-
provements of this paper.
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Y. X. Su (M’03) was born in Liaoning, China, in
1969. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in
mechanical engineering from Gansu University of
Technology, Lanzhou, China, in 1992, and 1995,
respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in mechatronics
from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in 2002.
From April 1996 to June 1998, he was a Teaching
and Researching Assistant in Xidian University.
From July 1998 to June 2000, he was a Lecturer in
Xidian University, where he has been an Associate
Professor in the School of Electro-Mechanical En-
gineering, since July 2000. He has been a Research Fellow in City University
of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, since March 2003. His research interests include
mechatronics, motion control, robotics, and design optimization.
B. Y. Duan was born in Hebei, China, in 1955. He
received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from North-
west Telecommunication Engineering Institute,
Xi’an, China, in 1981 and 1984, respectively, and
the Ph.D. degree from Xidian University, Xi’an,
China, in 1989.
From 1991 to 1994, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow
at the University of Liverpool, Liverpool, U.K.
During that time, he also worked at Hokkaido
University, Hokkaido, Japan, as a Research Fellow
from 1993 to 1994. He has made a short academic
visit to France and Australia. Currently, he serves as Professor of Mechanical
Engineering at Xidian University and is also the President of the university. His
research has concentrated on structural optimization, CAD, and mechatronics.
Prof. Duan is a Member of International Society of Computational Me-
chanics, Fellow of Chinese Institute of Electronics, Vice Chairman of Society
of Electromechanical Engineering in China; Member of Directing Committee
of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering in China; Member of Expert Group
of CAD Applied Engineering of Shaanxi province; Chairman of Society of
Electromechanical Engineering of Shaanxi province.
C. H. Zheng was born in Xi’an, China, in 1969. She
received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering
from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in 1991 and
the M.S. degree in automatic control and application
from Gansu University of Technology, Lanzhou,
China, in 1996. She is currently working toward the
Ph.D. degree in signal processing in the National
Key Laboratory of Radar Signal Processing at
Xidian University.
From June 1996 to January 2000, she was a
Teaching and Researching Assistant in Xi’an
Petroleum Institute, Xi’an, China. From February 2000 to present, she has been
a Lecturer in Xidian University. Her research interests include automation,
fuzzy signal processing, and support vector machine.
Y. F. Zhang was born in Inner Mongolia, China. She received the B.S. degree in
mechanical engineering from Gansu University of Technology, Lanzhou, China,
in 1998, and the M.S. degree in mechatronics from Xidian University, Xi’an,
China, in 2003.
Her research interests include automation.
G. D. Chen was born in Hangzhou, China, in 1966.
He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical
engineering from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in
1987 and 1990, respectively.
Since 1990, he has been a faculty member of
the University of Xidian, where he is currently an
Associate Professor. His research interests include
linear and nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems
and adaptive control.
Mr. Chen is a recipient of the 1998 National Sci-
ence Progress Award.
J. W. Mi was born in Gansu, China. He received the
B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Xidian
University, Xi’an, China, in 2001. He is currently
working toward the M.S. degree in mechatronics at
Xidian University.
His research interests include software engineering
and adaptive control.