Performance Evaluation for Cable Direct Driven Robot

The evaluation of cable robot performances cannot neglect the considerable limitations introduced by cable tension bilateral bounds, i.e. the fact that neither negative nor limitless cable forces can be exerted. Therefore, such constraints must be explicitly accounted for and the indexes typically employed for parallel robots cannot be employed straightforwardly. In this work, instead of proposing a new performance index, we introduce an approach to performance evaluations which is based on the computation of the maximum force, along a specific direction, which can be exerted by the cables on the moving platform of a fully actuated or redundant cable robot. Such a computation, once extended to the whole workspace of a robot or, if needed, to any direction, openly and effectively describes the robot performances and can be extremely useful in practice. The application of the method to two fully actuated and fully constrained planar cable robots, together with a comparison with popular performance indexes, gives evidence of the method effectiveness.