Kinematic And Workspace Analysis Of Minimally Routed Cable Driven Open Chains

This paper presents the kineto-static analysis of cable-driven serial kinematic chains (CDSKCs). The CDSKC are typically open-chain structures with complex cable routing and multiple links. By using cable routing between links, re-routing within links and cable bundles, any serial chain with n degrees of freedom can be controlled with n+1 cables. A generalized model that allows minimal and fully actuated cable routing for planar and spatial kinematic chain needs to be formulated. The analyses for CDSKCs require extensions from cable driven parallel manipulators (CDPMs) to consider the different types of cable routing. The workspace analysis of a single and multi-link CDSKC is performed. The effects of changing cable configuration on the feasible workspace for such multilink unilateral manipulators are explored and the configurations of largest reachable workspace are determined.