A Reconfigurable Cable-Driven Parallel Robot for Sandblasting and Painting of Large Structures

Lorenzo Gagliardini (1) , Stéphane Caro (2, 3) , Marc Gouttefarde (4) , Philippe Wenger (5) , Alexis Girin (1)

1 IRT Jules Verne - Institut de Recherche Technologique Jules Verne [Bouguenais]
2 LS2N - équipe RoMas - Robots and Machines for Manufacturing, Society and Services
3 LS2N - Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes
4 DEXTER - Robotique médicale et mécanismes parallèles
5 IRCCyN - Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes

The research work presented in this paper introduces a Reconfigurable Cable Driven Parallel Robot (RCDPR) to be employed in industrial operations on large structures. Compared to classic Cable-Driven Parallel Robots (CDPR), which have a fixed architecture, RCDPR can modify their geometric parameters to adapt their own characteristics. In this paper, a RCDPR is intended to paint and sandblast a large tubular structure. To reconfigure the CDPR from one side of the structure to another one, one or several cables are disconnected from their current anchor points and moved to new ones. This procedure is repeated until all the sides of the structure are sandblasted and painted. The analysed design procedure aims at defining the positions of the minimum number of anchor points required to complete the task at hand. The robot size is minimized as well.

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Lorenzo Gagliardini, Stéphane Caro, Marc Gouttefarde, Philippe Wenger, Alexis Girin. A Reconfigurable Cable-Driven Parallel Robot for Sandblasting and Painting of Large Structures. CableCon: Cable-Driven Parallel Robots, Aug 2014, Duisburg, Germany. pp.275-291, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-09489-2_20⟩. ⟨lirmm-01221407⟩