A novel design of robotic air bridge training system

With the rapid development of virtual realities, it becomes possible nowadays for industrial practitioners to incorporate these technologies into their own applications. In air cargo industries, operating the air bridge system is of high importance, but due to the limited resources and potential damages to the aircrafts, training every operator in real world systems is difficult. To solve this problem, an air bridge simulator embedded into virtual reality systems will be a very good alternative. In this paper, a four degrees-of-freedom (DOF) robotic motion platform is designed to simulate the movement of an air bridge. The platform is driven by four pairs of motors and ball screws, and we also design a damping system for the proposed platform to avoid sudden shock. The proposed design of the structure has several advantages. Firstly, the structure itself is very simple. Secondly, due to its redundant DOF, many challenging requirements can be easily satisfied, such as singularity avoidance and energy minimization. Thirdly, as the load of the system is shared by many universal ball bull eye bearings, the required driving force of the platform is reduced drastically due to the low friction coefficient, which increases the agility of the system a lot. The inverse kinematic model (IK) of the proposed robotic air bridge simulator is also derived, and the derived IK is then used to drive the platform to perform a trajectory tracking task in simulation environment.