Cable driven robot for camera motion with six degrees of freedom

A cable-string driven robot was designed to move a camera with six degrees of freedom. Its motion is controlled by a human operator with a joystick. The intended purpose is to follow an object moving on a surface below the camera. Motion is controlled with the length of the strings, which requires the solution of the inverse kinematics by the electronic controller. Incremental encoders are used to measure the string lengths, consequently a calibration procedure is proposed, which uses the solution for the forward kinematics. Strings as actuators cannot assert tension forces, which is a limitation for the working space. A parallel running model is used to calculate the string forces and to warn the operator before leaving the controllable space. Finally, some performance analysis of the real-time computations is given.