Wire Robots Part I: Kinematics, Analysis & Design

Abstract

In this chapter, the analysis and design of wire robots was discussed. The required basics like kinematics and the force equilibrium - which is the one of the main workspace criteria were introduced as well as serveral classification approaches. The analysis of wire robots was described as a CSP task which can be solved by interval analysis. Besides reliable results, the same CSP can be used for robot design by a variable exchange, which is generally a challenging problem. In addition to this continuous approach, also the more straightforward discrete methods are shortly introduced. The next chapter is dedicated to the application and control of wire robots. Therefore, the dynamical description as well as different methods to calculate a force distribution for a given pose and platform wrench are presented. Based on this, some control concepts are described. The use of wire robots for several fields of application is demonstrated by a number of examples.