A soft active control technique for telescope mechanical structure

Vibrations propagating into the mechanical systems can cause many problems at different levels causing performance degradation for sensitive systems. The proposed solution in this work is to use a six-axis active hexapod based on Stewart platform configuration. The rigidity of the legs of this hexapod determines the application to be used for; a stiff hexapod, for example, is used as a rigid interface for active damping and precision pointing applications while a soft hexapod is used, in general, for the purpose of active isolation of vibrations. Notice here that introducing the appropriate design, soft Stewart platform can be used for both precision pointing and vibration isolation.