A Suspended Cable-Driven Parallel Robot With Articulated Reconfigurable Moving Platform for Schönflies Motions

Cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) can provide large translational workspace with high payload, but their rotational capability is generally limited due to the inherent design. Additionally, among the existing topology structures of CDPRs, few lower mobility CDPRs with subspatial motions are reported till now. Aiming to narrow the abovementioned research gaps, this article presents a novel suspended CDPR with an articulated reconfigurable moving platform to generate Schönflies motions and enhance the rotational capability. The proposed robot uses four pairs of parallel cables to constrain the redundant motions. The moving platform consists of one end-effector gripper and two subplatforms, which are articulated through revolute joints. A gearbox is embedded in the moving platform to amplify the rotational motion about the vertical axis. For the proposed robot, the kinematic and static modeling is given in detail. The multiobjective optimal design is conducted to determine the dimensional parameters. The reconfiguration of the moving platform is formulated as an optimization problem and demonstrated through a case study. The interference-free static workspace is determined through a numerical approach. A prototype of the proposed robot is fabricated, and experimental tests are performed to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed robot.