Cable-driven robots have advantages which make them attractive solutions for a variety of tasks, however, the unidirectional nature of cable actuators complicates the design and often results in multiply redundant cable architectures which increase cost and robot complexity. This paper presents a stochastic optimization approach to the problem of designing a cable routing for a cable-driven manipulator to provide the desired robot workspace while minimizing the cable tensions required to perform a desired task. Two cable routing design variants are developed for a robot leg through the application of a stochastic optimization methodology called Particle Swarm Optimization. The PSO methodology is summarized, followed by a description of the specific implementation of the methodology to the particular problem of optimizing the cable routing of a robot leg. An objective function is developed to capture all pertinent design criteria in a quantitative evaluation of each particular set of cable parameters. Finally, a description of the PSO execution is presented and the results of the two optimization problems are presented and discussed.
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