Task-optimized cable-actuated planar parallel manipulator architecture and its concurrent implementation

This work presents an initial framework for an efficient new technique for obtaining task-optimized parallel manipulators with the aid of parallel computing through OpenMP directives. A cable-driven parallel manipulator is an architecture whose actuated limbs are cables. All of the cables must remain in constant positive tension to constrain the motion of the moving end-effector. A Differential Evolution algorithm is applied in order to optimize the topology and actuator specifications of a cable-driven parallel manipulator. The algorithm´s intrinsic parallelism is exploited using OpenMP directives to evaluate the manipulator´s associated reachable and wrench workspaces. The results show that this algorithm is effective at obtaining a task-optimized architecture for the cable-driven parallel manipulator. Parallel implementation is shown to improve the algorithm´s performance with a speedup of 7.4 times using ten cores on the Atlantic Computational Excellence Network (ACEnet) Fundy compute resource which utilizes Parallel Sun x4600 and x2200 AMD Opteron (dual-core) clusters.