Design and prototyping a cable-driven multi-stage telescopic arm for mobile surveillance robots

Telescopic mechanism has lots of merits and is used in devices and equipment long before the appearance of robots. This paper explores the merits of telescopic mechanism and designs a cable-driven multi-stage telescopic arm with only one actuated degree of freedom (DOF) for mobile surveillance robots. We use pulleys and cables as the transmission system and use a DC motor together with harmonic drive as the actuation system. We analyze the integration of pulleys and cables to reduce cost and carry out numerical analysis by simulation and prototyping. The results show that our arm is fast, portable, stable and has low cost. We expect it to be widely employed for camera lifting tasks in mobile surveillance systems without significantly increasing costs. We also expect its general usage as an arm to support various end-effectors.