Determination of the Cable Span and Cable Deflection of Cable-Driven Parallel Robots

In this paper, a method is proposed to compute the so-called cable span, i.e. the space occupied by the cables when the robot is moving within its workspace. As the cables are attached to a mostly fixed point on the robot frame, the shape of the cable span is a generalized cone. We present an efficient method polar sorting to compute the surface of this cone. Furthermore, the found geometry of the cone is employed in the design of the cable anchor points in order to dimension its deflection capabilities and to compute a suitable orientation for the installation of the mechanical unit.