Design and control of a redundant suspended cable-driven parallel robots

This paper introduces a six degree-of-freedom suspended parallel robot driven by eight cables. The determination of an optimal geometry of such a parallel cable robot together with the design of a prototype are briefly outlined. Then, based on usual kinematic modeling, a basic control strategy is presented. Since the parallel cable-driven robot presented here is redundantly actuated, this control strategy has to deal with the problem of cable tension distribution. This latter turns out to be challenging because of the under-constrained nature of the considered cable-driven robot. The extension to these robots of existing tension distribution methods is finally discussed.