Environment for the Design and Automation of New CDPR Architectures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a design and automation environment for studying control trajectories in novel cable-driven parallel robots, validated through simulation and industrial prototype testing with high accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a new environment for designing and testing control trajectories in unconventional CDPR architectures, including simulation and real-world validation.

Findings

Simulated model reproduces trajectories with up to 0.35% deviation.

Environment effectively supports workspace analysis of new CDPR designs.

Validated with industrial hardware under various dynamic conditions.

Abstract

This paper presents a design and automation environment to study the control trajectory for new CDPR architectures, for instance CDPRs with an unusual number of cables or different motor location in the robot frame. In order to test the environment capabilities, an architecture of a planar under-constrained CDPR was designed, simulated, and implemented using standard industrial hardware. Both the simulated model and industrial prototype were running the same trajectories to determine the time delay and the error position between them. The tests have demonstrated that the simulated model of the CDPR reproduces the trajectories of the equivalent industrial prototype with a maximum deviation of 0.35% under loading and different speed conditions, despite the time delays produced by the data transmission and the non-deterministic communication protocols used to connect the industrial automation controller with the simulated model. The results have shown that the environment is suitable for trajectory control and workspace analysis of new CDPR architectures under different dynamic conditions.