Design and Experiments of a Redundantly Actuated Cable-Driven Parallel Robot

Cable-driven parallel robots have attracted lots of interests in the past few decades due to their unique advantages. This paper presents a redundantly actuated cable-driven parallel robot, which achieves 6 DOFs by 8 driving cables. Moreover, the proposed cable robot employs modular design, realizing fast reconfigurability. Detailed design of the robot has been presented including the delicate winch module, the cable transmission module, and the sensors together with the motion controller. Besides hardware design, inverse and forward kinematics of the robot are formulated, based on which trajectory planning is done including straight lines and splines. Finally, prototype of the robot is fabricated and preliminary experiments are made through writing tests. Results prove the validity of the proposed cable-driven parallel robot.