Workspace Analysis of a Cable-Suspended Robot With Active/Passive Cables

Abstract

Cable-driven parallel robots have several outstanding characteristics that make them unique in many robotic applications. Since cables can only pull, one of the most important issues associated with these robots is obtaining their workspace. In this paper a spatial translational cable-driven robot with active/passive cables is considered and its workspace is investigated from several points of views. First the moment resisting capability of the robot is discussed and the effects of some robot’s parameters on the workspace are studied. Then, both force-feasibility and moment-resisting capability of the robot are considered to find the region where the end-effector may exert the required force-set and resist an external moment simultaneously. Furthermore, the wrench-feasibility of the redundant cable-driven robot is studied and finally a method of obtaining non-fluctuating positive tensions in all cables is proposed by using a particle swarm optimization approach.