Control systems
feel stability, overshoot and damping arrive as motion rather than as a plot on a slide.
Uses · Education
Tune a loop.
Feel the overshoot.
A screen shows a graph. A platform moves a student through it. Drive the Portal Development Kit (PDK), a development kit, from code and surge, sway, heave, roll, pitch and yaw stop being symbols in a rotation matrix and become the thing happening to the person in the seat.
Development Kit: early-access hardware, software in active development.
One platform, a curriculum ›Ask the hard question first ›The build is the first lab ›
One platform, a curriculum
Three courses that can share one machine.
Riders are 18 and over.
Kinematics
A real six-axis parallel mechanism to program, model and study — forward and inverse kinematics students can watch run.
Motor control
Field-oriented control on hardware, with the drive loop and the encoder chain documented rather than sealed.
Ask the hard question first
Does motion actually improve training?
The skeptical finding is well known: a 1992 meta-analysis in Military Psychology reported that motion cuing added little to the training environments for jets, and that result has been cited against motion platforms ever since.
The follow-up work separated the data. A 2012 meta-analysis in the International Journal of Aviation Psychology distinguished between tasks where motion carries information the pilot must act on and tasks where it does not — the effect was strong for helicopter and disturbance tasks and near zero for manoeuvring fixed-wing aircraft.
Hays, Jacobs, Prince & Salas (1992), Military Psychology 4(2):63–74, doi:10.1207/s15327876mp0402_1 · de Winter, Dodou & Mulder (2012), International Journal of Aviation Psychology 22(2):164–183, doi:10.1080/10508414.2012.663247. Both read against the abstracts of record on 13 September 2026.
The build is the first lab
Departments have been
building these by hand
for years.
Engineering departments have hand-built Stewart platforms because commercial six-axis hardware sat outside any teaching budget. That work is valuable. What changes here is that you start from a kit of parts with an Installation Guide rather than from nothing.
Keep reading
Academic research
The neighboring page, for when the platform becomes apparatus rather than syllabus.
The Ecosystem
What arrives, what it costs, and what the students assemble.
Talk to us
For a question a page cannot answer.
Every build starts with this platform. The PDK + ARK Ecosystem finishes it — racing chassis, wheelbase, wheel, load-cell pedals and button box, development-kit price $8,499.99.
Order a development kitAll four builds ›
Built to allocation · ready to ship an estimated 3–6 months from order confirmation; delays of up to 12 months are possible