Translational Planar Cable-Direct-Driven Robots

A planar cable-direct-driven robot (CDDR) architecture is introduced with only translational freedoms. The motivation behind this work is to improve the serious cable interference problem with existing CDDRs and to avoid configurations where negative cable tensions are required to exert general forces on the environment and during dynamic motions. These problems generally arise for rotational CDDR motions. Thus, we propose a class of purely translational CDDRs; of course, these are not general but may only perform tasks where no rotational motion or resistance of moments is required at the end-effector. This article includes kinematics and statics modeling, determination of the statics workspace (the space wherein all possible Cartesian forces may be exerted with only positive cable tensions), plus a dynamics model and simulated control for planar translational CDDRs. Examples are presented to demonstrate simulated control including feedback linearization of the 4-cable CDDR (with two degrees of actuation redundancy) performing a Cartesian task. We introduce an on-line dynamic minimum torque estimation algorithm to ensure all cable tensions remain positive for all motion; otherwise slack cables result from the CDDR dynamics and control is lost.