Computing Cross-Sections of the Workspace of Suspended Cable-Driven Parallel Robot with Sagging Cables Having Tension Limitations

Abstract

Although workspace is essential for the design and control of cable-driven parallel robots (CDPR) very few works have been devoted to this topic when sagging cables are considered, most probably because of the complexity of the cable model. In this paper we consider suspended CDPR with sagging cables that can support only a limited tension. We propose an algorithm to compute the border of horizontal cross-sections of the workspace for a given altitude and orientation of the platform. We show that singularities of the kinematics equations have to be taken into account for a proper determination of the border and that the workspace can be separated in several components according to the branch of the inverse kinematics on which the robot is evolving. We also compare the workspace obtained for ideal and sagging cables.