Cable robots

Article summary

Cable-driven parallel robots (also called cable robots, cable-suspended robots or wire-driven robots) are a type of parallel manipulators in which flexible cables are used as actuators. One end of each cable is reeled around a rotor twisted by a motor, and the other end is connected to the end-effector. One famous example of cable robots is Skycam which is used to move a suspended camera in stadiums. Cables are much lighter than rigid linkages of a serial or parallel robot, and very long cables can be used without making the mechanism massive. As a result, the end-effector of a cable robot can achieve high accelerations and velocities and work in a very large workspace (e.g. a stadium). Numerous engineering articles have studied the kinematics and dynamics of cable robots (e.g. see In The International Journal of Robotics Research 27.9 (2008): 1007–1026. for an enhanced of the concept). Dynamic analysis of cable robots is not the same as that of other parallel robots because cables can only pull an object but they cannot push. Therefore, the manipulator is able to perform a task only if the force in all cables are non-negative. Accordingly, the workspace of cable robots is defined as a region in space where the end-effector is able to exert the required wrench (force and moment vectors) to the surroundings while all cables are in tension (non-negative forces).…

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