Short Description
The elasticity of long cables and winding speed limitations of winches makes it hard to precisely control the platform of Cable-Driven Parallel Robots (CDPRs). The PiSaRo robot is a CDPR with onboard thrusters. Due to the short response time of the thrusters, it is possible to overcome for the aforementioned limitations.
On the one hand, the cables are used for slow movements of the robot, and to maintain its pose without consuming energy. On the other hand, the thrusters are used for dynamic trajectories and to reject fast external disturbances like wind bursts. A potential application for the PiSaRo robot is the autonomous cleaning of skyscrapers.
Challenges
- Simultaneously handling the allocation of the redundant actuators and their saturation in a single control law.
- Offset-free NMPC theoretical verification.
- Efficiently interfacing the different actuators, sensors and computers.