On the Design of a Novel Cable-Driven Parallel Robot Capable of Large Rotation About One Axis

This paper presents a novel architecture of cable-driven parallel mechanism that yields large orientation capability around one axis. Design decisions and justifications are presented with the aim of producing a human-scale haptic interface used for the rehabilitation of patients in a fully immersive virtual environment. The rehabilitation task to be reproduced by the haptic interface consists in carrying a crate from a shelf to a nearby table. This task requires a large rotation of the crate about the vertical axis, which cannot be achieved by conventional cable-driven parallel architectures. The novel architecture presented can generate Schonflies motion which should be useful in other tasks accomplished by cable-driven parallel robots.