Active Cables Selection for Collocated Vibration Control of Small-Sized Overconstrained Cable-Driven Parallel Robots

Abstract Cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) are well appreciated for high dynamics applications, due to their lightweights moving parts. Nevertheless, due to the low stiffness of cables, vibrations can occur and can degrade performances if high precision is required, such as in additive manufacturing for instance. Previous works have studied techniques to counteract vibrations, like using motor command or embedded devices. Based on a previous first exploration of using piezoelectric transducers on cables for this type of robot, this paper presents a proper formulation of the collocated active vibration control to damp the end-effector oscillations of small-sized overconstrained CDPRs by the measure of the variation in cable tensions. This goes through a modeling of such a robot with embedded piezoelectric transducers under appropriate assumptions. From this control formulation, it is shown that the collocated nature of these transducers are fundamental. It is thus possible to highlight an energetic index of active cables selection, regardless of the used control law. The proposed technique is developed theoretically and analyzed through simulations on an eight-cable robot.