This article focuses on the essential limitations of planar point-mass cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) in covering all poses of their footprint, which results in concave-shape static workspaces (SW) and also providing a zero force level on the borders of such a SW. Accordingly, a novel passive counterbalancing mechanism is proposed which not only expands SW to fully cover the footprint but also enables CDPR's platform to balance a desired minimum force magnitude in any arbitrary direction all over the SW. Maximizing such force magnitude is defined as an optimization problem which is used to find the optimal values of the proposed mechanism's design parameters. By comparing the SW of different CDPRs with and without the proposed mechanism, effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated. In some examples, it is shown that the effects of the proposed method on the SW size increment is more than doubling the size and number of actuators. Finally, two experimental setups are presented and tested, where effectiveness of the proposed approach in covering the CDPRs’ footprint and also providing the desired minimum force level over the SW are demonstrated.

中文翻译：

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一种新型被动平衡机制的平面电缆驱动并联机器人的扳手可行性和工作空间扩展

本文重点介绍平面点质量电缆驱动并联机器人 (CDPR) 在覆盖其足迹的所有姿势方面的基本限制，这导致凹形静态工作区 (SW) 并在边界上提供零力水平这样的SW。因此，提出了一种新颖的被动平衡机制，它不仅扩展 SW 以完全覆盖足迹，而且使 CDPR 的平台能够在整个 SW 的任何任意方向上平衡所需的最小力大小。最大化这种力的大小被定义为一个优化问题，用于找到所提出的机构设计参数的最佳值。通过比较不同 CDPR 的 SW 在有和没有提出的机制的情况下，证明了所提出的方法的有效性。在一些例子中，结果表明，所提出的方法对 SW 尺寸增量的影响是执行器尺寸和数量的两倍多。最后，提出并测试了两个实验设置，其中证明了所提出的方法在覆盖 CDPR 的足迹以及在 SW 上提供所需的最小力水平方面的有效性。