Force Transmission Index Based Workspace Analysis of a Six DOF Wire-Driven Parallel Manipulator

This paper presents a novel six DOF wire-driven PKM. Its moving platform is supported by seven wires via spherical joints, and at the other end each wire is driven by a servo motor via a pulley mounted on a frame. The force transmission index (proposed by Takeda [15]) is adopted to analyze the relationship of the force transmissibility between the wires and the moving platform. Moreover, the workspace analysis of the moving platform is investigated by means of force transmission index. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate the application of the algorithm to determine the workspace of two manipulators with different design parameters using Monte-Carlo technique under the Matlab environment. The results show that the proposed algorithm can determine the workspace with different force transmissibility. The simulation results reveal that if more random points are selected, the practical workspace will be closer to the theoretical one.