Optimal Design of Dexterous Cable Driven Parallel Manipulators

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Article history: Received: July 10, 2009 Received in revised form: November 11, 2009 Accepted: December 2, 2009 Optimal design of parallel manipulators is known as a challenging problem especially for cable driven robots. In this paper, optimal design of cable driven redundant parallel manipulators (CDRPM) is studied in detail. Visual Inspection method is proposed as a systematic design process of the manipulator. A brief review of various design criteria shows that the optimal design of a CDRPM cannot be performed based on single objective. Therefore, a multi objective optimal design problem is formulated in this paper through an overall cost function. Furthermore, a proper weighting selection for the overall cost function is proposed, which can be viewed as a promising method to the open problem of parallel manipulator design. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is applied on the design of KNTU CDRPM, an eight actuated with six degrees of freedom CDRPM, which is under investigation for possible high speed and wide workspace applications in K. N. Toosi University of Technology. Finally, a combined numerical optimization algorithm is used to find the unique global optimum point. The result shows a significant enhancement in the performance characteristics of the KNTU CDRPM compared to that of the other CDRPMs. Since the proposed method is not restricted to any particular assumption on the objectives and design parameters, it can be used for optimal design of other manipulators.