Modeling, optimal path planning and tracking control of a cable driven redundant parallel robot

In this paper, dynamic modeling, optimal path planning and control scheme on a redundant parallel cable robot is presented. Path planning in parallel robots necessitates the consideration of robot’s kinematics to discern the singularities in the workspace. Also, dynamics analysis is required to consider actuation constraints. To this end, kinematics and dynamics of cable driven redundant parallel robot is derived. In this modeling, cables are assumed to be rigid with negligible mass and hence, tension and sagging along the cable are neglected. Next, a sampling-based algorithm upon rapidly-exploring random tree is developed to increase the convergence rate. In this scheme, distance, epochs and safety are considered as optimization constraints. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in collision avoidance, a number of obstacles have been considered too. Tracking of the planned path has been handled using a feed-forward controller in the presence of obstacles. Regarding the redundancy feature of robot, a redundancy resolution scheme is considered for optimal force distribution. Path planning and control algorithms are implemented on the RoboCab (ARAS Lab.) and experimental results reveal the efficiency of the proposed schemes.