Design and analysis of an under-constrained reconfigurable cable-driven parallel robot

Abstract

In this paper, we first design a new reconfigurable cable-driven parallel robot, whose cable drawing points can be relocated by extra cables. Compared to most existing cable-driven robots whose cable drawing points are assumed to be fixed, the designed robot can operate in a very large workspace eliminating the possible collision between cables and surrounding environment. Then some interesting and challenging tasks for the robot are outlined, indicating that the designed mechanism may find some potential applications in practice. After that, the kinematics, dynamics, and workspace of the mechanism are analyzed, and dynamically feasible trajectories are designed analytically taking advantage of the unilateral cable tension constraints. Finally, a numerical simulation is carried out to show the effectiveness of the dynamic trajectory planning technique.