First experimental testing of a dynamic minimum tension control (DMTC) for cable driven parallel robots

Abstract

Cable tension distribution is an important issue in parallel cable-driven robots to obtain high efficiency and accuracy of motion. In this paper, a novel approach is introduced to optimize cable tension distribution of cable-driven parallel robots, which consists in modifying the minimum tension of the cables according to the dynamics of the system. This method has been compared to the traditional, fixed-minimum tension approach on a 2-cable, 1 DOF test bed with different settings of the controller. First experimental results showed that Dynamic Minimum Tension Control (DMTC) can be better than traditional approaches in terms of accuracy and energy consumption.