A Cable-Suspended Robot With a Novel Cable Based End Effector

Abstract

Object handling is one of the most important applications of cable-suspended robots, which can be obtained by use of a gripper as its end-effector. In this paper, a novel cable-driven multi-finger gripper assembled on a cable-suspended robot has been presented. Using lock/unlock mechanisms, the under-actuated finger mechanism has been designed to have a human like motion. A cable-suspended robot structure with 3 position degrees of freedom is also proposed by employing active/passive cables in such a way that makes it capable of resisting external moments, while it may be simplified to a spatial point-mass cable robot during positioning operation. Furthermore, the robot workspace has been investigated and by considering both lower and upper cable tension limits, a formulation for obtaining the force-feasible workspace is presented and the influence of the minimum tension limit on the workspace is discussed. Finally the moment-resisting capability of the proposed robot has been investigated and by considering several cases, its moment-resisting region is compared to an analogous robot.