Tether Entanglement and Modelling for Tethered Industrial Robots

Tethered robots suffer from imminence of cable entanglement. Elements of mathematical knot theory, Kirchhoff's rod theory and elliptic curves are applied to tethered industrial robots in this study to first model the trailing cable and then mathematically characterize cable entanglement in order for the future path planning of the robot. This cable-agnostic to cable-aware path planning change is required to avoid or minimize cable entanglement due to the robot motion. While the resulting procedure does not allow active avoidance of cable entanglement, it greatly improves inference and allows pre-emption by mathematically characterizing cable entanglement. A practical method is also suggested that allows for the implementation of the developed theory. Three case studies of tethered robots are done to prove this.