Workspace Analysis for Planar and Spatial Redundant Cable Robots

Abstract

This paper presents workspace analysis of planar and spatial cable robots having one or more redundant cables. The proposed approach, which is based on a variant of Bland’s pivot rule, provides all poses (positions/orientations) reachable by the cable robot platform with any number of cable redundancies. By virtue of this method, there is no need to use successive determinants to compute the workspace; this results in less computation time. Additionally, another algorithm, which takes advantage of reduced row-echelon form of the system matrix, is proposed for the case of cable robots with only one redundant cable and also to include upper limit for tensions in cables as an important factor in workspace analysis of the cable robots. Simulation results are provided to show the merits of the proposed methods to compute the available static workspace of the redundant cable robots.