Path Planning of a Mobile Cable-Driven Parallel Robot in a Constrained Environment

A Mobile Cable-Driven Parallel Robot (MCDPR) is a special type of Reconfigurable Cable-Driven Parallel Robot (RCDPR) composed of a classical Cable-Driven Parallel Robot (CDPR) mounted on multiple mobile bases. The additional mobility of the mobile bases allows such systems to autonomously modify their geometric architecture, and thus make them suitable for multiple manipulative tasks in constrained environments. Moreover, these additional mobilities make MCDPRs kinematically redundant. Therefore, the subject of this paper is to introduce a two stage path planning algorithm for MCDPRs. The first stage searches for a feasible and collision free path of mobile bases. The second stage deals with generating an optimal path of the moving-platform to displace it from an initial to a desired pose. The proposed algorithm is validated through simulation on a three degree-of-freedom (DoF) point mass moving-platform displaced by four cables with each cable carried by an independent mobile base.