Design, Manufacturing, Modelling, and Control of a Cable-Driven Parallel Robot for Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

The cable-driven parallel robots are desirable for the manufacturing of large-scale structures due to their enhanced level of flexibility. This is particularly appealing in future construction industry additive manufacturing, where the system can be conveniently deployed at different locations with minimum setup change. This paper proposed a cable-driven parallel robot prototype design for additive manufacturing applications. The cable-driven parallel robot has 6 degrees of freedom and is thus capable of performing translational and rotational manipulation. To address the tension-induced inaccuracies in actuating the cable-driven robot, this paper presents a compensation method to consider the tension force and positioning error by modifying the trajectory and its geometrical relationships. Enhanced positioning performances and the 3D printing results are verified through experiments.