Dynamics of winch-integrated cable-driven parallel robots and acceleration space analysis

A winch integrated cable-driven parallel robot (WICDPR) is a cable robot with winches mounted on the mobile platform. Such winch-integrated configuration improves the installation flexibility and reconfigurability of cable robots, but weakens their dynamic performance. This paper investigates the dynamic coupling effects of WICDPRs based on the dynamic model. The acceleration space is used to evaluate the influence of the winch inertia on the dynamic performance of robot. To overcome the dimensional homogeneity problem of the general acceleration space, the translational acceleration space and the rotational acceleration space are introduced, and the calculation methods are given. Two case studies are presented to show the effects of winch inertia on the dynamic performance of the WICDPRs, and an example of design of the winch system is included. Finally, the experimental results validate the arguments presented in this paper.