The Dimensional Synthesis of Spatial Cable-Driven Parallel Mechanisms

This paper presents a method for the dimensional synthesis of fully constrained spatial cable-driven parallel mechanisms (CDPMs), namely, the problem of finding a geometry whose wrench-closure workspace (WCW) contains a prescribed workspace. The proposed method is an extension to spatial CDPMs of a synthesis method previously published by the authors for planar CDPMs. The WCW of CDPMs is the set of poses for which any wrench can be produced at the end-effector by non-negative cable tensions. A sufficient condition is introduced in order to verify whether a given six-dimensional box, i.e., a box covering point-positions and orientations, is fully inside the WCW of a given spatial CDPM. Then, a nonlinear program is formulated, whose optima represent CDPMs that can reach any point in a set of boxes prescribed by the designer. The objective value of this nonlinear program indicates how well the WCW of the resulting CDPM covers the prescribed box, a null value indicating that none of the WCW is covered and a value greater or equal to one indicating that the full prescribed workspace is covered.