Adaptive Synchronization Control of Cable-Driven Parallel Robots With Uncertain Kinematics and Dynamics

Cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) are a new type of parallel robots with a mobile platform driven by several cables. The flexibility of the structure not only helps them perform better than traditional parallel robots, but also brings about the issues of model uncertainty and multicable coordination. To handle these problems, a novel adaptive synchronization control (ASC) scheme is proposed to suppress the uncertainties of kinematics and dynamics simultaneously, regulate the coordination motion of multiple cables, and finish high-precision tracking tasks. In the proposed scheme, apart from tracking error, a new synchronization error is introduced to describe the coordination motion relationship between adjacent cables. According to these defined errors, the kinematic and dynamic adaptation laws are designed through the linear expressions of kinematic and dynamic models, respectively. Finally, the ASC scheme is presented as well as a tension distribution algorithm. The tracking experiments are implemented on a redundantly actuated 3-degree-of-freedom CDPR with four cables. The proposed ASC scheme can effectively complete the correction of the model parameters by using the feedback of errors and enhance the tracking accuracy of each cable and the synchronization accuracy between all the cables significantly, thereby ultimately improving the control performance of the mobile platform.