Ph.D. Dissertation Defense by Paul Bosscher
Thursday, November 11, 2004

(Dr. Imme Ebert-Uphoff, Chair)

"Disturbance Robustness Measures and Wrench-Feasible Workspace Generation Techniques for Cable-Driven Robots "

Abstract

Cable robots are a type of robotic manipulator that has recently attracted interest for large workspace manipulation tasks. Cable robots are relatively simple in form, with multiple cables attached to a mobile platform or end-effector. The end-effector is manipulated by motors that can extend or retract the cables.

Cable robots have many desirable characteristics, including low inertial properties, high payload-to-weight ratios, potentially vast workspaces, transportability, ease of disassembly/reassembly, reconfigurability and economical construction and maintenance. However, relatively few analytical tools are available for analyzing and designing these manipulators.

This thesis focuses on expanding the theoretical framework for the design and analysis of cable robots in two areas: disturbance robustness and workspace generation. Underconstrained cable robots cannot resist arbitrary external disturbances. Thus a disturbance robustness measure for general underconstrained single-body and multi-body cable robots is presented. This measure captures the robustness of the manipulator to both static and impulsive disturbances. Additionally, a wrench-based method of analyzing cable robots has been developed and is used to formulate a method of generating the wrench-feasible workspaces for cable robots. The concepts of robustness and workspace generation are then combined to introduce a new workspace: the Specified Robustness Workspace. This workspace consists of all poses of the manipulator that meet or exceed a specified robustness value.