Configuration Robustness Analysis of the Optimal Design of Cable-Driven Manipulators

Designing an effective cable architecture for a cable-driven robot becomes challenging as the number of cables and degrees of freedom of the robot increase. A methodology has been previously developed to identify the optimal design of a cable-driven robot for a given task using stochastic optimization. This approach is effective in providing an optimal solution for robots with high-dimension design spaces, but does not provide insights into the robustness of the optimal solution to errors in the configuration parameters that arise in the implementation of a design. In this work, a methodology is developed to analyze the robustness of the performance of an optimal design to changes in the configuration parameters. This robustness analysis can be used to inform the implementation of the optimal design into a robot while taking into account the precision and tolerances of the implementation. An optimized cable-driven robot leg is used as a motivating example to illustrate the application of the configuration robustness analysis. Following the methodology, the effect on robot performance due to design variations is analyzed, and a modified design is developed which minimizes the potential performance degradations due to implementation errors in the design parameters. A robot leg is constructed and is used to validate the robustness analysis by demonstrating the predicted effects of variations in the design parameters on the performance of the robot.