System Identification and Cable Force Control for a Cable-Driven Parallel Robot with Industrial Servo Drives

In a cable-driven parallel robot, elastic cables are used to manipulate the end effector in the workspace. In this paper we present a dynamic analysis and system identification for the complete actuator unit of a cable robot including servo controller, winch, cable, cable force sensor and field bus communication. We establish a second-order system with dead time as an analagous model. Based on this investigation, we propose the design and stability analysis of a cable force controller. We present the implementation of feed-forward and integral controllers based on a stiffness model of the cables. As the platform position is not observable the challenge is to control the cable force while maintaining the positional accuracy. Experimental evaluation of the force controller shows, that the absolute positional accuracy is even improved.