Antenna and satcom
Check how a stabilized antenna holds lock and rejects wave-induced depointing, against a scripted motion profile you can re-run tomorrow.
Uses · Maritime
Sea states,
on the bench.
A vessel does not just roll. Crossing a wave it drops, slides sideways and lunges forward while rolling, pitching and yawing — all at once. Reproducing that on a bench needs six axes, because any subset of them is a different motion than the one the hardware will actually meet. The Portal Development Kit (PDK) is a six-axis development kit for that bench.
Development Kit: early-access hardware, software in active development.
Why six ›Development uses ›What a desk-scale rig does not test ›
Why six
A vessel does not
just roll.
Hardware that has to work at sea meets heave, sway and surge simultaneously with roll, pitch and yaw, and it is the combination that breaks things — a stabilizer that holds against roll alone can lose lock the moment the deck also drops.
Development uses
Three benches, one platform.
MRU and DP gyro bench work
Mount a motion reference unit or dynamic-positioning gyro to a scripted profile and compare its output against the commanded profile, as an early bench step; sea trials and approvals stay with you.
Heave-compensation development
A desk-scale bench for developing and stress-testing active heave compensation control before committing to full-scale hydraulics.
Profiles can be scripted to cycle the standard World Meteorological Organization sea states. That is a reference scale we drive the platform against — not a certification, and not a claim that the platform reproduces any given state to a stated tolerance.
The boundary
What a desk-scale rig does not test.
The base under a motion-compensated gangway is a Stewart platform, and so is this one. The architecture is the same, and that is useful: a control engineer can develop and argue about compensation algorithms on real six-axis hardware rather than in simulation alone.
It is not the same machine. A walk-to-work system moves tonnes through meters against real sea loads with hydraulics sized for it. This platform moves a bench payload through a compact envelope. It is a bench for checking your control law, your sensor and your compensation. It will not tell you what your full-scale actuators will do under load.
Keep reading
The Stewart platform
The geometry this whole page rests on, and what it costs.
Robotics and industrial
The neighboring page: the same bench, judged on engineering tolerances.
Talk to us
For a question a page cannot answer.