Path Following Demonstration of a Hybrid Cable-Driven Parallel Robot

In the context of applications requiring large workspace such as painting of airliners, a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) having a manipulator (robot arm) on-board its mobile platform possesses an interesting potential. Such a robotic system has typically more than six degrees of freedom (DOFs) and, hence, more than the minimum required to accomplish a task in Cartesian space. In particular, a robotic system consisting of a six-DOF cable-driven parallel robot whose mobile platform is equipped with a seven-DOF manipulator is considered in this paper. This robotic system being kinematically redundant, a redundancy resolution scheme is used to allow its end-effector to follow a relatively complex path in Cartesian space while avoiding cable collisions and satisfying some constraints on the CDPR workspace.