Analytic Determination of Wrench Closure Workspace of Spatial Cable Driven Parallel Mechanisms

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient way of determining analytically the Wrench Closure Workspace (WCW) of spatial redundant cable-driven parallel mechanisms (CDPM). The method builds upon the boundary surface equations obtained from the null space of the structure matrix of CDPM. The set of feasible solutions is obtained that satisfies positive tension in the cables. This method was applied to characterize the WCW of spatial CDPM which has redundancy of 1 or 2. A simulation study was carried out to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the method. Several advantages over conventional approaches for determining the WCW were identified through simulation.