Stiffness-based trajectory planning of a 6-DOF cable-driven parallel manipulator

The stiffness of the cable-driven parallel manipulator is usually poor because of the cable flexibility, and the existing methods on trajectory planning mainly take the minimum time and the optimal energy into account, not the stiffness. To solve it, the effects of different trajectories on stiffness are studied for a six degree-of-freedom cable-driven parallel manipulator, according to the kinematic model and the dynamic model. The condition number and the minimum eigenvalue of the dimensionally homogeneous stiffness matrix are selected as performance indices to analyze the stiffness changes during the motion. The simulation experiments are implemented on a six degree-of-freedom cable-driven parallel manipulator, to study the stiffness of three different trajectory planning approaches such as S-type velocity profile, quintic polynomial, and trigonometric function. The accelerations of different methods are analyzed, and the stiffness performances for the methods are compared after planning the point-to-point straight and the curved trajectories. The simulation results indicate that the quintic polynomial and S-type velocity profile have the optimal performance to keep the stiffness stable during the motion control and the travel time of the quintic polynomial can be optimized sufficiently while keeping stable.