Scientific instruments are known to be extremely precise and demanding in terms of disturbance rejection. Stringent requirements on new instruments often require mounting sensitive parts on multi-degree-of freedom active isolation platforms. However, after several decades of research and development, converting performance objectives into efficient mechatronic designs remains an art due to non-trivial factors such as non-linearities, residual couplings or subtle control-structure interactions. Most of the time, new objectives induce new design trade-offs, imposing a specific dedicated design.
This presentation will cover several recent prototypes of active vibration isolation platforms and give some insight about the design methodology and technical choice made to reach a high level of performance.