To effectively reduce the mass and simplify the structure of traditional aerial manipulators, we propose novel light cable-driven manipulator for the aerial robots in this article. The drive motors and corresponding reducers are removed from the joints to the base; meanwhile, force and motion are transmitted remotely through cables. Thanks to this design, the moving mass has been greatly reduced. In the meantime, the application of cable-driven technology also brings about extra difficulties for high-precise control of cable-driven manipulators. Hence, we design a nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller using time-delay estimation. The time-delay estimation is applied to obtain lumped system dynamics and found an attractive model-free scheme, while the nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller is utilized to enhance the control performance. Stability is analyzed based on Lyapunov theory. Finally, the designed light cable-driven manipulator and presented time-delay estimation-based nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller are analyzed. Corresponding results show that (1) our proposed cable-driven manipulator has high load to mass ratio of 0.8 if we only consider the moving mass and (2) our proposed time-delay estimation-based nonsingular terminal sliding mode is model-free and can provide higher accuracy than the widely used time-delay estimation-based proportional–derivative (PD) controller.

中文翻译：

---

一种为空中机器人开发的光缆驱动机械手：结构设计与控制研究

为了有效减轻传统空中机械手的质量并简化结构，我们在本文中提出了一种用于空中机器人的新型轻型电缆驱动机械手。驱动电机和相应的减速机从接头到底座上拆下；同时，力和运动通过电缆远程传输。由于这种设计，移动质量已大大减少。同时，电缆驱动技术的应用也给电缆驱动机械手的高精度控制带来了额外的困难。因此，我们设计了一个使用时延估计的非奇异终端滑模控制器。应用时延估计来获得集总系统动力学，并找到了一个有吸引力的无模型方案，而非奇异终端滑模控制器被用来提高控制性能。基于李雅普诺夫理论分析稳定性。最后，对设计的光缆驱动机械手和基于时延估计的非奇异终端滑模控制器进行了分析。相应的结果表明：（1）如果我们只考虑移动质量，我们提出的电缆驱动机械手具有 0.8 的高负载质量比；（2）我们提出的基于时延估计的非奇异终端滑模是无模型的，并且可以提供比广泛使用的基于时间延迟估计的比例微分 (PD) 控制器更高的精度。