A reconfiguration strategy for Reconfigurable Cable-Driven Parallel Robots

Abstract

This paper deals with Reconfigurable Cable-Driven Parallel Robots (RCDPRs). A RCDPR is able to change the locations of its cable exit points, the latter being defined as the connection points between the cables and the robot base frame. Given a RCDPR, a set of possible reconfigurations, a desired platform path and a description of the robot environment, the reconfiguration strategy proposed in this paper selects the optimal configurations to be associated to each point of the desired path. The selection of the optimal configurations can be performed with respect to several criteria such as the number of configuration changes, the number of cable reconfigurations and the robot stiffness. In this paper, the optimization is performed using a Dijkstra's based algorithm.