Development of a Reconfigurable Planar Cable-Driven Parallel Robot Combined with a Visual Servoing Module for Upper Limb Rehabilitation

Cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) continue to gain attention for their numerous advantages. However, their use is affected by certain restrictions caused by their flexible nature. Their rotational workspace is limited because of the unidirectional characteristic of their cables, which work only in traction, and because of the risk of collisions between their moving parts. To fully exploit the advantageous features of this family of robots, a solution to the presented issue is proposed in this paper. It consists in adding a translational degree of freedom to an actuator so that the latter translates, when needed, to enlarge the reachable rotational workspace. The control of the reconfigurable designed prototype was developed using ROS combined with an exteroceptive visual sensor to continuously track and correct the end-effector’s poses.