Robust PID control of fully-constrained cable driven parallel robots

In this paper dynamic analysis and robust PID control of fully-constrained cable driven parallel manipulators are studied in detail. Since in this class of manipulators cables should remain in tension for all maneuvers in their workspace, feedback control of such robots becomes more challenging than that of conventional parallel robots. In this paper, structured and unstructured uncertainties in dynamics of the robot are considered and a robust PID controller is proposed for the cable robot. To ensure that all cables remain in tension internal force concept is used in the proposed PID control algorithm. Then, robust stability of the closed-loop system with proposed control algorithm is analyzed through Lyapunov direct method and it is shown that by suitable selection of the PID controller gains, the closed-loop system would be robustly stable. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed PID algorithm is examined through experiments on a planar cable driven robot and it is shown that the proposed control structure is able to provide suitable performance in practice.