Cable-Driven Parallel Robot Design for Scanning 3D Art Objects

Cable Driven Parallel Robots, or CDPRs, might provide art historians and curators with an improved automated way of scanning 3D art objects. This application requires CDPRs to rotate around a 3D object with large panning and tilting, while avoiding collisions. While no designs exist for this purpose, this article investigates and proposes new cable robot geometries. First, we built a workspace model to quantify the performance of a design. A brainstorm and the ACCREx method then provided us with over 100 promising robot architectures. Their subsequent testing with the workspace model revealed the nine most promising architectures. Lastly, a geometry optimization resulted in the most favourable CDPR geometries. It appeared that mainly cable force limits, cable-statue and platform-statue collision are limiting the workspace of the CDPRs. In the end, the best enclosing and non-enclosing design are capable of reaching 29% and 16% respectively of the required 180 degrees workspace around the statue. Without extra panning and tilting these percentages are 79% and 66% respectively. Both designs show to which extend a statue can be scanned by a CDPR from one configuration.Mechanical Engineering | BioMechanical Desig