Determination of the wrench-closure translational workspace in closed-form for cable-driven parallel robots

Workspace determination for robots is an important step in analysis and synthesis. A couple of methods for computing the wrench-closure workspace of cable-driven parallel robots were reported in the literature but all methods tend to be time consuming. In this paper, a new algorithm is presented that exploits different techniques to speed up the computation. Pre-computation is largely exploited and benefit are gained both from considerations in computer algebra and efficient numerical routines. Results from the computation of the translational (sometimes also called constant orientation) wrench-closure workspace are presented and performance values are provided. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the method proposed in this paper is superior in terms of computational time to any other approach for workspace computation.