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Design and Control of a Suspended Cable-Driven Parallel Robot with Four

Cables

Conference Paper · September 2018

DOI: 10.1109/ICRoM.2018.8657534

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 Design and Control of a Suspended Cable-Driven
Parallel Robot with Four Cables
Ramin Mersi, Sina Vali Morteza Shahamiri haghighi, Ghasem Abbasnejad Mehdi Tale Masouleh
Human and Robot Human and Robot Human and Robot
Interaction Laboratory Interaction Laboratory Interaction Laboratory
University of Tehran School of Electrical School of Electrical
Tehran, Iran and Computer Eng. and Computer Eng.
Email: r.mersi@mail.sbu.ac.ir, University of Tehran University of Tehran
s.vali@mail.sbu.ac.ir Tehran, Iran Tehran, Iran
Email: morteza.shahamiri@ut.ac.ir, Email: m.t.masouleh@ut.ac.ir
ghasem.abbasnejad@ut.ac.ir

Abstract—This paper presents the state of the art of design
and control of a new suspended under-constrained cable-driven
parallel robot with four cables. In order to improve the estimation
of the cable lengths, an auxiliary roller screw mechanism is
utilized to move the winch linearly for proper cable coiling on
one layer. Also, in order to compute the configuration of the robot
in real-time, a gyro sensor is installed on the end-effector. The
collected data from the gyro sensor is used to make equivalent
the solution of the direct geometric-static problem to the solution
of linear system of equations. The foregoing reduced system can
be readily solved and leads to the position of the end-effector in
real-time which is a definite asset in control. Moreover, kinematic
problem of the cable-driven parallel robot is provided and a new
approach for solving the forward kinematic problem is proposed.
Index Terms—Cable-driven parallel robot; Kinematics; For-
ward kinematics; Real-time; Control
I. I NTRODUCTION
Cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) employ cables in
place of rigid-body legs to control the end-effector (EE) pose.
The use of cables in CDPRs provides several advantages such
as reduced weight and inertia, larger operational distance, ease
of assembly and disassembly, high transportability, modular-
ity and reconfigurability. CDPRs are called over-constrained
when the number of cables m is bigger than the number of
degrees of freedom (DOF), n, that the EE possesses with
respect to the base (m > n) and they are referred to as
under-constrained when the number of cables is less than
the number of degrees of freedom (m < n). In the case of
under-constrained CDPRs, only some EE’s DOF may be con-
trolled [1, 2], and the EE actual configuration depends on the
applied forces [2]. Several applications of such robots consist
of measurement, rescue, service or rehabilitation operations
[3, 4, 5], where a limited number of controlled DOFs are
required in order to decrease complexity, cost, set-up time,
likelihood of cable interference, etc.
A major challenge in the control of under-constrained CD-
PRs arises from the fact that for determining the EE configu-
ration, geometric constraints and mechanical equilibrium must
be taken into account, simultaneously. As such, displacement-
analysis problems become significantly more complex than
tasks concerning fully-constrained manipulators [6, 7]. In [8],
robot configurations that ensure static equilibrium of the
payload at a desired pose are developed while constraints on
the tension of the cables is considered. In [9], the fact that
robot configurations may admit multiple payload equilibrium
solutions is addressed by developing constraints that guarantee
the existence of a unique payload pose. In [10, 11, 12], a
general methodology for the kinematics, static and stability
analysis of general under-constrained CDPRs is proposed. The
method allows one to find the entire set of configurations
of under-constrained CDPRs when all the n cable lengths
are assigned, e.g., Direct Geometrico-static Problem (DGP)
is dealt. In [13], direct geometrico-static analysis of under-
constrained cable-driven parallel robots with three cables is
studied. An interval-analysis-based procedure is proposed to
numerically find all the real equilibrium configurations of the
end-effector for a robot of generic geometry. As extension of
the aforementioned work, in [14], the authors utilized a similar
approach to compute all the equilibrium configurations for
under-constrained CDPRs with an arbitrary number of cables.
None of the above literatures propose a method for solving
the DGP of under-constrained cable-driven parallel robots in
real-time and there is still a gap in the literature regarding the
latter issue. The best computational time to solve the DGP
of under-constrained cable-driven parallel robots is presented
in [14], which is 702s by a single-core execution, and 178s
by over 4 CPUs for a 4 cable robot and cannot be regarded
as a real-time approach. In [15], a new method based on the
data obtained by a gyro sensor installed on the EE is proposed
for real time computation of the DGP of an under-constrained
CDPR with four cables. From the data of the gyro, and upon
applying some mathematical manipulations, the DGP is made
equivalent to the solution of a system of linear equations which
reduces the computation time, significantly.
In this paper, the design of a new 4-cable under-constrained
CDPR is introduced which is as extension of the design
introduced in [15]. Compared to the design of the robot in [15],
this robot is improved in terms of its cable actuation. In the
former design, classical winches were utilized on which the
cables were free to coil and motor shaft bore the weight of the
winch system. This design suffered from the major drawback
of error in the estimation of cable lengths. In the new design
presented in this paper, however, the winches are mounted on
an auxiliary roller screw mechanism to ensure the only one
layer for the coiled cables which allows a good estimation of
the cable length. In addition, the skeleton of the robot bears the
weight of the winch system. The DGP of the robot is solved
similar to the approach proposed in [15], by collecting the
data of a gyro sensor installed on the EE. As such, real-time
computation of the DGP can be ensured in order to control
the EE on its trajectory, which is the subject of an upcoming
section of this paper.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section II, the experimental setup of the CDPR is divided
into mechanical and electrical design which are described in
details. Section III presents the forward and inverse kinematics
problems of the CDPR, and a new approach for solving
the forward kinematics is expressed. In section IV, a control
algorithm is designed based on the kinematics problem and a
PID controller is implemented. In section V, the experimental
results of this paper has been shown. Finally, in section VI
the paper concludes with some hints and remarks as ongoing
work.
II. E XPERIMENTAL S ETUP OF CDPR
In this section, the mechanical design and geometric config-
uration of the new designed 4-cable CDPR built at the Human
and Robot Interaction Laboratory of University of Tehran in
addition to the utilized electrical parts are introduced.
Fig. 1. The cable-driven parallel robot constructed at the Human and Robot
Interaction Laboratory, University of Tehran.
TABLE I
T HE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EXPLOSION CONFIGURATION OF CDPR.
No. Component Model
- Driver Kinko FDA422-LA-000
1 Actuator Kinko SME80S-0075-30AAK-3LKH
2 Coupling JT50
3 3-bar Pad -
4 Aluminium Winch -
5 Ball Screw Nut SCI02005
6 Screw -
7 Chromic bar -
8 Upper Plate -
9 Bottom Plate -
10 Ball Bearing SKF 6002
11 Angle Contact -
A. Mechanical Design
Figure 1 illustrates the under study CDPR constructed at
the Human and Robot Interaction Laboratory. The workspace
of the robot is in the form of a cube with dimensions
5m×3m×2.5m. The manipulator consists of four cables
rolling packs, a moving platform and four electrical motors
which are controlled by PC to coil and uncoil cables. Figure 2
demonstrates the explosion plan of one of the four cable rolling
packs in details with all its components listed in Table I.
According to the latter figure, two horizontal and four vertical
steel plates are connected to each other which build the
skeleton of the system. The actuator is connected to the rolling
system through a coupling which serves as a mechanical fuse.
Using a rolling screw system and three long rods, rotary and
translational motion can be achieved simultaneously by the
actuators. The main idea behind the design of the moving
winches and their grooved shape consists in avoiding multi-
layer cable coiling and to keep the attachment point of the
cable to the winch fixed all the time. It has been attempted
to lessen the friction to its minimum point by separating the
moving parts from the static parts by using ball bearings and
ball screw system.
B. Electrical Design
Figure 3 depicts the general view of the experimental
setup of the CDPR which defines the relation between the
components. In order to control the CDPR, an Arduino Due
is utilized which sends the data using the HC-05 Bluetooth
module. Furthermore, the length of the cables are determined
by using the encoders inside the motors and a load cell sensor
is installed on the spool to ensure the presence of a certain
amount of force in cables. In the case of a 4 cables under-
constrained CDPR, up to a combination of 3 DOFs can be
controller among the possible 6 DOF of the EE. For the sake
of practical application, in this project, the EE is intended
to exhibit translational movement, therefore an MPU sensor
is placed on the EE for solving the kinematic problems, more
precisely, forward kinematic problem, which is fully discussed
in what follows.
1) MPU sensor: In order to get the feedback from the EE’s
orientation, an accelerometer is used. The MPU-9150 is a 9-
DOF Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) in a single package.
 Fig. 2. Explosion view of the designed cable rolling system.
Fig. 3. General view of experimental setup of the cable robot, electrical and
mechanical equipments.
It contains a 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope, 3-axis
magnetometer and a Digital Motion Processor™ (DMP™)
hardware accelerator engine. It uses I2C communication at a
maximum of 400 kHz baud rate. The range of each sensor is
configurable: the accelerometer’s scale can be set to ±2g, ±4g,
±6g, ±8g, or ±16g, the gyroscope supports ±250, ±500,
and ±2000 °/s, and the magnetometer has the full-scale range
of ±1200T (±12 gauss). The data of these three sensors are
combined to obtain the roll, pitch and yaw angles of the EE
with minimum possible error. The latter is possible due to
the fact that a data fusion procedure based on the so-called
Kalman filter is applied.
2) Driver: Drivers can use RS-232 and RS-485 serial
communication to communicate with the computer. Both of
them can be used to communicate between some devices as
master/slave communication, which in this case, the PC is used
as master and the Drivers are used as slave. The maximum
baud rate for both of them is 115.2 kHz. The RS-232 can
support the Modbus and the internal protocol to communicate,
but the RS-485 can just use Modbus. In Modbus, due to
the security considerations, the communication’s baud rate
reached to the lower value, so the RS-232 is selected with
the internal protocol.
III. K INEMATICS
The main purpose in the kinematic investigation of manipu-
lators consists in determining the geometry of motion without
considering forces and torques. Kinematics is divided into two
types namely forward and inverse kinematics and are outlined
in this section.
A. Inverse Kinematic Problem
The inverse kinematic problem pertains to obtaining the
length/position of actuators, in this case, the length of the
cables, with respect to the pose of the EE [16].
According to Fig. 4, which shows the schematic model of
the 6-DOF spatial CDPR, Ai and Bi denote the attachment
points of ith cable to the actuator and EE, respectively. OG
stands for the origin of the global coordinate system and
OE shows the origin of the local coordinate system which
is located on the center of the EE. Note that ai and bi are
constant vectors in OG and OE coordinates, respectively. The
closed-loop position equations associated with ith kinematic
chain could be written as follows [9]:
ai + li = p + bi (1)
Equation (1) could be written in OG as follows:
ai + li = p + Rbi (2)
where R is the rotation matrix from OE to OG which could
be written as follows:
⎡ ⎤
cψ c φ cψ sφ sθ − sψ cθ cψ sφ cθ + sψ sθ
R = ⎣ sψ cφ sψ sφ sθ + cψ cθ sψ sφ cθ − cψ sθ ⎦ (3)
−sφ cφ sθ cφ cθ

Fig. 4. Schematic view of a CDPR with i cables.
In the above s denotes the sine, while c denotes the cosine of
its indexed argument. Moreover, θ , φ and ψ stand for angles of
rotation about x, y and z axis, respectively. As aforementioned,
the angles of rotation of the EE are determined by the MPU
attached to the EE.
By replacing bi with Rbi and rearranging Eq. (2), one has:
li = p + bi − ai
By multiplying the two sides of the equation with their
transpose leads to the following:
lTi li = (p + bi − ai )T (p + bi − ai )
Eventually, the inverse kinematic problem for each cable is
achieved:
|li |2 = |p|2 +|bi − ai |2 +2(bi − ai )T p
B. Forward Kinematic Problem
In turn, the forward kinematic problem concerns with ob-
taining the position of the EE by knowing the length of the
cables which can be computed from the position of the motor
shafts. In parallel manipulators, solving forward kinematics is
much more complicated than its inverse. Here, a new method
for solving the forward kinematic problem is introduced. For
solving the latter problem, a closed loop chain should be
written as discussed before. Therefore, Eq. (6) is going to
be applied in this section. Upon simplifying the components
of Eq. (6), one has:
|bi − ai |2 = (bi1 − ai1 )2 + (bi2 − ai2 )2 + (bi3 − ai3 )2
|li |2 = L2i
|pi |2 = x2 + y 2 + z 2
Fig. 5. Top view of the four spheres. The EE’s position is located on their
intersection point p
(bi − ai )T p = x(bi1 − ai1 ) + y(bi2 − ai2 ) + z(bi3 − ai3 ) (10)
Substituting Eqs. (7) to (10) into Eq. (6) leads to:
L2i =x2 + y 2 + z 2 + (bi1 − ai1 )2 + (bi2 − ai2 )2 + (bi3 − ai3 )2
+ 2x(bi1 − ai1 ) + 2y(bi2 − ai2 ) + 2z(bi3 − ai3 )
(4) (11)
By rearranging the above equations, one can obtain the
following:
(5) L2i = (x + (bi1 − ai1 ))2 + (y + (bi2 − ai2 ))2 + (z + (bi3 − ai3 ))2
(12)
Clearly, this equation represents the equation of a sphere.
In the manipulator under study, four cables exist. So, as it can
be observed from Fig. 5, there are a total of four spheres. The
(6) intersections of these four spheres are two points that indicate
the possible location of the EE. The one that is situated in the
manipulator’s configuration space is the right position.
Having three spheres out of four is sufficient for finding the
intersection points, there are different methods to obtain these
points like the GQFK method [17]. Another method is finding
points using analytic geometry that is discussed in details in
the following section.
C. Finding Intersection Points of Three Spheres Using Ana-
lytic Geometry
Assuming that there are three spheres and by writing their
algebraic equations and subtracting two of them from the other
one, equations of the two planes will be achieved which is
illustrated in Fig. 6. According to the parametric form of the
line equation:
(7) ⎧
⎨ x = at + x0
y = bt + y0 (13)
(8) ⎩
z = ct + z0
and by rearranging the equations in vector representation,
(9) it could be written as follows:

Fig. 6. The three spheres and two planes formed by subtracting the equations
representing the intersection on p1 and p2 .
p = u × t + p0
where u is a vector parallel to the intersection line, p0 is
a point on this line and t is a variable. By intersecting the
line with one of the spheres, the value of t along with the
intersection points will be determined.
For finding a vector parallel to the intersection line of the
two planes, the cross product of the normal vectors can be
taken into consideration:
u = n1 × n2
where n1 and n2 are the normal vectors of the planes. In
order to achieve a mutual point on the two planes, a constant
number could be assigned to one of the variables of the planes
and two others would be determined by solving the two plane
equations.
IV. C ONTROL OF THE CDPR
Figure 7 depicts the control block diagram for controlling
the under study CDPR. Because the robot has four actuators
and they are only capable to pull the cables, three out of six
DOF can be controlled; then, x, y, and z are used as input
parameters which represent the EE’s position. Since the size
of the EE is negligible with respect to the robot dimensions,
and the feedback from the forward kinematic problem can be
compensated for positional error, the EE can be assumed as
a mass point. In other words, the orientation of the EE in
the space becomes constant. With this assumption, the inverse
+ MPU, respectively. In addition, a new method for solving the
- Jacobian Controller System
Desired
Trajectory
Forward
kinematics Data fusion
Fig. 7. The block diagram structure of kinematic control of CDPR.
kinematic problem of the robot can only be solved using the
EE’s position.
As aforementioned, forward kinematic problem is required
to measure the cable lengths and orientation of the EE.
The obtained position from the forward kinematic problem,
compared to the desired position and the calculated error is
mapped to the joint space by using the Jacobian matrix of the
robot. The controller tries to compensate this error by applying
a speed proportional to the error.
By using trial and errors practical tests, the PID coefficients,
Kp , Ki and Kd tuned experimentally as follows:
Kp = 2.4, Ki = 0.3, Kd = 0.1 (16)
V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
In order to experimentally ensure the validation of the
proposed algorithm, this algorithm is implemented practically
(14) on the robot. As previously explained, the EE’s position is
obtained from the solution of the proposed forward kinematic
problem. It should be noted that, the length of the cables
are derived from the data obtained by the encoder and the
initial cable length at the robot reference point. The MPU is
mounted on the EE. For this purpose, a square-shaped path
with dimensions 1m×1m is defined in space with plenty of
points. The torque of the motor is depicted in Fig. 8, where the
robot tracks the latter path. As expected, on each sides of the
square path, two motors are pulling the cable and two other
(15)
motors are running out of the cable, so two of them have the
positive torque and two others have negative. Also, due to the
small load and the inherent property of ball screw to increase
the power transmission, the torque applied by the actuators are
relatively small.
Figure 9 shows the desired and tracked paths. The maximum
absolute error along X ,Y and Z axis are as follows:
M AEx = 1.06 cm M AEy = 1.69 cm M AEz = 4.51 cm
VI. C ONCLUSION
This paper presented an experimental setup of a new mech-
anism for a cable driven parallel robot. The design of the cable
rolling system was such that the winch has a helix motion that
prevents the cable intertwining. By using ball bearings and
ball screw system, friction has been significantly reduced and
performance became smoother. Forward and inverse kinematic
problem have been solved by knowing the cable lengths and
EE angles which are derived from motor encoders and the
forward kinematic problem, an important issue in control of
such robot, was introduced. Based on the solved kinematic
MPU
problems, a PID controller was implemented on the system,
the manipulator was launched and the results were extracted.
From the practical tests, it can be inferred that the robot had
a smooth operation and perform the commands with the least
errors.
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