Design and Analysis of a High-Payload Manipulator Based on a Cable-Driven Serial-Parallel Mechanism

In this paper, a lightweight high-payload cable-driven serial-parallel manipulator is proposed. The manipulator comprises one 3-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) shoulder joint and one single-DOF elbow joint. Using a special tension-amplifying principle, which is an ingenious two-stage deceleration method, the proposed manipulator has a higher load/mass ratio than those of conventional manipulators. In this paper, the special tension-amplifying principle is discussed in detail. The shoulder and elbow joints of the proposed manipulator are driven by cables. The design of this cable-driven mechanism and the mobility of the joints are analyzed, and the structural parameters of the joints are optimized to improve the payload capacity. The size of the manipulator is close to that of a human arm because the actuators of the cable-driven mechanism can be rear-mounted. Because the elbow joint is located at the end of the shoulder joint and the driven cables of the elbow joint are coupled with the rotation of the shoulder joint, the manipulator is designed with decoupled cable routing. The overall configuration and cable routing of the manipulator are presented, and then, kinematics, joint stiffness, strength, and workspace of the manipulator are analyzed. Finally, we report on the fabrication of a physical prototype and testing of its joint stiffness, payload capacity, workspace, speed, and repeatability to verify the feasibility of our proposed manipulator.