Improvement of Cable Tension Observability Through a New Cable Driving Unit Design

The context of this paper is a research project on a Cable-Driven Parallel Manipulator uses to reproduce the free flight condition of aircraft models in wind tunnels (SACSO Project). The force control of the CDPM enables to simulate the thrust of the aircraft engine, and to modify the scale model mass and inertia. A very important point for an efficient force control is an accurate estimation of the cables tension. In this paper, an original Cable Driving Unit with an integrated 3D force sensor is developped to improve the cable tension observability. An associated Extended Kalman Filter implementation is then proposed to estimate the cables tension.