A Strategy for Moving Cable Driven Robots Safely in Case of Cable Failure

摘要

Cable driven robots are often suggested for applications in which they operate close to, or even in contact with, human operators. The well known broadcasting and rehabilitation use are just two representative examples. Safety is therefore a critical issue. The aim of this paper is to introduce a motion planning strategy for leading a cable robot to a safe position of the workspace in case one or more cables brake or become slack during the motion. The strategy is addressed to redundant cable robots and guarantees that the tensions of the unbroken cables are kept positive and bounded along the whole path toward a safe position. The strategy is then applied to a point-mass planar cable robot, with two translational degrees of freedom to prove its effectiveness.