Guaranteed reachable domain and control design for a cable robot subject to input constraints

cable-suspended robots are structurally similar to parallel actuated robots but with the fundamental difference that cables can only pull the end-effector but not push it. From a scientific point of view, this feature makes feedback control of cable-suspended robots a lot more challenging than their counterpart parallel-actuated robots, in this paper, we present a computationally efficient control design procedure for a fully actuated cable robot with positive input constraints. The basic idea is to calculate a set of reachable domain analytically, where a neighboring domain possesses common points. This allows to expand the region of feasible reference signals by simply connecting adjacent feasible domains. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by numerical simulations and laboratory experiments on a six degree-of-freedom cable suspended robot.