Modeling and Control of a 3-DOF planar Cable-Driven Parallel Robot with Flexible Cables

This paper investigates the control problem of cable-driven parallel robots (CDPR) under the assumption of non-straight cables. It shows that, for trajectories with high dynamics, when the inertia of the cables becomes comparable to the one of the platform, the deformations of the cables are not negligible anymore. Therefore, accounting for the corresponding flexible modes in the dynamic model becomes necessary to reach high bandwidth. Moreover, a methodology is proposed to derive an ODE model to be used for both simulation and controller design purposes. The proposed methodology enables independent specification of the bandwidth on cables tension, platform rotation, and platform translation.