Workspace delineation of cable-actuated parallel manipulators

Ethan Stump, University of Pennsylvania
R. Vijay Kumar, University of Pennsylvania

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Postprint version. Published in Proceedings of the 2004 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference (DETC 2004), 28th Biennial Mechanisms and Robotics Conference, Volume 2B, pages 1303-1310.

Abstract

While there is extensive literature available on parallel manipulators in general, there has been much less attention given to cable-driven parallel manipulators. In this paper, we address the problem of analyzing the reachable workspace using the tools of semi-definite programming. We build on earlier work [1,2] done using similar techniques by deriving limiting conditions that allow us to compute analytic expressions for the boundary of the reachable workspace. We illustrate this computation for a planar parallel manipulator with four actuators.