Development of a planar cable-driven parallel robot for submillimeter and terahertz beam mapping measurements

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, reconfigurable beam mapper using a planar cable-driven robot for precise millimeter-wave beam pattern measurements, improving accuracy and speed in field diagnostics.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel cable-driven planar robot design for beam mapping, with a computer-vision tracking system achieving sub-1mm accuracy in optical configurations.

Findings

Achieved in-plane position error of 2.7 mm (RMSE) over 400 mm x 400 mm workspace.

Demonstrated in-plane repeatability of 0.81 mm.

Enhanced measurement speed and accuracy compared to handheld methods.

Abstract

The spatial sensitivity pattern of millimeter-wavelength receivers is an important diagnostic of performance and is affected by the alignment of coupling optics. Characterization can be challenging in the field, particularly in the decentered and tightly packed optical configurations that are employed for many astronomical millimeter-wave cameras. In this paper, we present the design and performance of a lightweight and reconfigurable beam mapper, consisting of a bank of thermal sources positioned by a planar cable-driven robot. We describe how the measurement requirements and mechanical constraints of the Tomographic Ionized-carbon Mapping Experiment (TIME) optical relay drive the design of the mapper. To quantify the positioning performance, we predict the beam patterns at each surface to derive requirements and use a non-contact computer-vision based method built on OpenCV to track the payload position with an accuracy better than 1.0 mm. We achieve an in-plane absolute payload position error of 2.7 mm (RMSE) over a $\sim$400 mm $\times$ 400 mm workspace and an in-plane repeatability of 0.81 mm, offering substantial improvements in accuracy and speed over traditional handheld techniques.