Manipulability Analysis of Cable-Driven Serial Chain Manipulators

Understanding the manipulability of a manipulator is critical to interpreting manipulators’ motion generation abilities in the taskspace environment. A manipulator that can alter the manipulability characteristics provides an advantage in making it suitable for versatile applications. Recently, cable-driven serial chain manipulators, CDSMs, due to their promising features, such as low moving inertia, large payload handling capacity, and ability to alter the architecture, have emerged as an important robotic platform for various applications. These systems offer flexibility in architecture modulation, thus implying the possibility of modulating the manipulability. In this context, the current work focuses on the manipulability analysis of CDSMs by formulating the effect of cable routing on the capability of the manipulator to generate motion. In particular, two different planar cable routing architectures are considered. A quantitative measure for the CDSM’s manipulability is constituted to study the variations over the workspace. Further, from the application perspective, the potential of utilizing the cable routing alteration to improve the manipulability of cable-driven leg exoskeleton is presented.