Workspace analysis of planar and spatial redundant cable robots

Abstract

This paper presents analysis of workspace of planar and spatial redundant cable robots by using two analytical approaches. The first one is based on linear algebra. It can include the upper limits for tension in cables as an important factor in optimum design of cable robots in order to find the largest possible workspace. The second approach is based on a variant of Bland's pivot rule; by virtue of this method we leave out the use of successive determinates to compute workspace resulting in less computation time. Both approaches provide all of poses (positions/orientations) reaching by the cable robot end-effector for all types of cable robots with any number of redundancy.