Abstract
A cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) consists of an end-effector, flexible lightweight cables, pulleys, winches, and a rigid base frame. As opposed to the rigid links of the traditional serial robots and parallel robots, the flexible lightweight cables allow the CDPR to easily achieve the high speed, heavy payload manipulation, and scalable workspace. Especially, the conventional high-speed pick and place operation can be realized due to the lightweight of its flexible cables. However, the flexibility of the lightweight cables can introduce a considerable vibration problem to the high speed cable robot system. One of main causes can be a cable tension difference between initial pre-tension and winding tension around a drum of the winch-motor actuator. To effectively investigate the effect of the tension around the drum on the high speed manipulation of the cable robot system, the spatial eight-cable high speed cable robot was reduced to the horizontal two cable system. The reduction of the number of the cable enables us to minimize the influences from the other factors such as the cable sagging and the geometric errors. A series of experiments was conducted using the combinations of the low and high initial pre-tensions and low and high tensions around the drum. The experimental results clearly show that the low tension around the drum can cause the vibration problem during the high speed pick and place operation. Also, it demonstrates that securing the drum tension similar to the initial pre-tension can effectively reduce the magnitude of the vibration.
Overconstrained Cable-Driven Parallel Manipulators Statics Analysis based on Simplified Static Cable Model
