A proposal for a wire suspended manipulator: A kinematic analysis

Abstract

Industrial robots have a high positioning accuracy and stiffness but their work spaces are limited because their bases are fixed to the ground. To enlarge the work spaces, this paper proposes a novel mechanism, a wire suspended manipulator with three degrees of freedom. First, the kinematics of the mechanism is derived from both force and geometric constraints. Second, the volume of the work space is numerically calculated. After the evaluation of manipulability of the wire suspended system, guidelines for designing parameters are studied.