Visual Servoing of Cable-Driven Parallel Robots with Tension Management

Cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) are a type of parallel robots, where cables are used instead of rigid links. This leads to many advantages, such as large workspace, low mass in motion and simple reconfiguration. The drawbacks are accuracy issues and complex cable management. Indeed, it is usual that cables become slack. That can be caused by, for example, cable mass, uncertainties in the system, and a higher number of cables than the number of degrees of freedom of the moving-platform. This reduces CDPR stiffness and degree of actuation. While visual servoing provides good accuracy and is robust to different perturbations in the system and to modeling errors, it does not deal with cable slackness. Thus, a CDPR with visual servoing can become underactuated due to cable slack. We propose in this paper to enrich visual servoing with a tension correction algorithm. Experimental results show reduction of slackness and thus avoiding slackness-related trajectory perturbations and loss of stability.