Optimal design of cable-driven parallel robots for large industrial structures

This paper presents the preliminary studies dedicated to the design of cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) for industrial purposes. The goal is to transport the proper tools around a jacket, an offshore structure supporting a wind turbine, in order to perform painting and sandblasting tasks. In this paper, a simplified case study consisting of a structure composed of four tubes is investigated. A fully constrained CDPR and a suspended CDPR are studied. The design problems of the CDPRs at hand are formulated as optimization problems. They aim at determining the locations of the base anchor points of the cables that minimize the size of the CDPR, while satisfying a set of constraints. Those constraints guarantee that the moving platform can support the external wrenches and that there is no interference between the cables and between the cables and the environment, all along the path to be followed by the moving platform.