2017 年 83 巻 9 号 p. 863-869
A wire suspended manipulator is proposed for extending its working space. A manipulator is fixed on a base plate suspended by six wires. The base plate is completely constrained by the wires, but their tensions change according to the motion of the manipulator or force disturbances acting on the suspended part, which may cause undesirable vibrations or turnover of the base plate. To avoid such situations, four counter weights driven by DC motors are mounted on the base plate. These counter weights are controlled by the feedback signals from tension sensors of six wires to keep the wire tensions positive. After the relationship between wire tensions and the counter weight motion are analyzed, a control law to keep the desirable tensions is proposed and it is installed into the prototype of the wire suspended manipulator system. The results of some fundamental experiments prove the analyzed static performance of the system and also verify the effectiveness of the proposed control system.