DESIGN AND TESTING OF AN ULTRA-HIGH-SPEED CABLE ROBOT

摘要

The goal of this paper is to introduce the design and testing of a new ultra-high-speed robot. This robot is able to reach speeds of over 120 cycles per minute for pick-and-place applications. A parallel manipulator design was chosen because of its low inertia and high stiffness. The inertia of the robot was further reduced by replacing some of the rigid links with cables. The use of cables requires a method for keeping the cables in tension, which was provided by a central compression member between the moving and fixed plate. The compression member keeps all the cables in tension but does not interfere with the robot's workspace. The new cable-based parallel manipulator design, called DeltaBot, is kinematically constrained to have three pure translational degrees of freedom. A prototype of DeltaBot was built and tested. The DeltaBot prototype is capable of reaching 150 cycles per minute with a position repeatability of less than 0.1 mm.