An effective strategy of real-time vision-based control for a Stewart platform

A Stewart platform is a kind of parallel robot which can be used for a wide variety of technological and industrial applications. In this paper, a Stewart platform designed and assembled at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) by our research group is presented. The main objective is to overcome the enormous difficulties that arise when a real-time vision-based control of a fast moving object placed on these mechanisms is required. In addition, a description of its geometric characteristics, the calibration process, together with an illustrative experiment to demonstrate the good behavior of the platform is given.