Designing redundant cable-driven parallel robots for additive manufacturing using end-effector compliance index

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for optimizing cable anchor points for cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) for specific additive manufacturing tasks. Much of a CDPR's workspace is generally not used for printing tasks. The unused workspace of the CDPR can be sacrificed to gain greater control to fulfill the printing task. In this paper, the CDPR is designed for a specific task to achieve the best printing results. To find the optimum robot size, the stiffness of the end-effector and mean cable tension are analyzed. The end-effector compliance index (ECI) is proposed to assess the stiffness of the end-effector within the workspace. The ECI uses cable directions to determine the compliance of a given robot pose. From simulation results, a relation to get optimum CDPR frame size is achieved for both suspended and constrained type CDPRs. The proposed method can be used to design low-cost cable-driven robots for additive manufacturing.