Design and Simulation of a Cable-Driven Parallel Manipulator for Monitoring and Inspection of Structures

Monitoring, inspection, maintenance, construction, and restoration are nowadays challenging activities conducted during the process of civil infrastructure management, due to the revolutionary impact of mechatronics and information technology for their automation. In this paper, numerical simulations are proposed for a Cable-Driven Parallel Manipulator designed for inspection and monitoring of buildings and structures. Robots can effectively replace personnel for performing dangerous or unsafe operations. Referring to structures’ inspection, autonomous or tele-operated solutions can be used. In addition to conventional robotics, such as drones, mobile robots and climbing robots, which have become a reality in the last years, Cable-Driven Robots can be used, as completely new application, to locate the terminal link, i.e., the end-effector, carrying suitable sensors and/or specific tools, in wide application areas. In this paper, we address the problem of considering a specific type of buildings, those for which there are not regularly shaped walls or edges. We consider steel glass-façades buildings, with irregular shape. For this kind of buildings, the inspection can be very difficult, time consuming and quite expensive. Considering an irregular shape building, design consideration and simulations results of the inspection are proposed in this paper.