Optimizing Cable Arrangement in Cable-Driven Parallel Robots to Improve the Range of Available Wrenches

This paper presents a new method for maximizing the range of wrenches that a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) can apply on its moving-platform. In this problem, the optimization parameters are the attachment positions of the cables to the moving platform. It is supposed that the attachment points are selected from a set of candidate points. The combinatorial nature of this problem makes it non-trivial and complicated, especially when the whole workspace of the robot is considered in the optimization problem. In this paper, it is shown that this cable arrangement problem can be represented mathematically by a zero-one multi-dimensional knapsack problem. Then, a core concept method is used to find the optimal solution. As an example, the proposed method is applied to a 6-DOF CDPR with eight cables. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can efficiently solves the cable arrangement problem in polynomial time.