A Modeling Method of the Cable Driven Parallel Manipulator for FAST

Abstract

A Five Hundred meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is being built in China, and a similarity model was set up in Beijing for further study of FAST. In FAST, A six-cable driven parallel manipulator is adopted as the first level adjustable feed support system. This paper addresses the complete modeling method of the six-cable driven parallel manipulator of FAST with cable mass and elastic deformation. Comparing with the precise catenary modeling equation, modeling and solution of line equation is easier and quicker, but has modeling error for cable driven parallel manipulator. Hence, analysis and compensation method of the modeling error is studied in detail, which encourages the line equation to model and solve the six-cable driven parallel manipulator accurately. Finally, simulation and experiment have been done for supporting the modeling and error compensation methods in this paper.