Study of reconfigurable suspended cable-driven parallel robots for airplane maintenance

This paper discusses the use of large-dimension reconfigurable suspended cable-driven parallel robots (CDPR) to substitute for conventional gantry nacelles that carry workers in an airplane maintenance workshop. The reconfiguration of the CDPR is considered as a multi-objective optimization problem with two performance indices. One criterion is the sum of the cable tensions which is directly related to the power consumption of the CDPR. The other criterion is the normalized upper bound on the infinitesimal displacement of the mobile platform, used here as a means to quantify the stiffness of the CDPR. A systematic procedure is proposed to find optimal reconfigurations of the CDPR while dealing efficiently with the tradeoff between these two criteria.