Design and error compensation of a 3-degrees-of-freedom cable-driven hybrid 3D-printing mechanism

Abstract. In large-scale 3D additive manufacturing (AM), rigid printing mechanisms exhibit high inertia and inadequate load capacity. In this paper, a fully constrained 3-degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) cable-driven hybrid mechanism (CDHR) is developed. A vector analysis method considering error compensation in the pulley system is proposed for analysing the kinematics and dynamics. To address the cable-driven mechanism's strict cable force range requirement, a prescribed-performance controller (PPC) with an adaptive auxiliary system is designed for the nonlinear cable system to enhance the stability and motion accuracy of the end-effector. The stability of the control system is proven using the Lyapunov function. A physical simulation environment using Simscape is developed to verify the vector analysis method and the PPC. Subsequently, an experimental prototype of a 3-DOF CDHR is developed. The results of the error compensation experiment and the prescribed-performance controller experiment demonstrate a 93.321 % reduction in maximum plane error and a 95.376 % reduction in maximum height error for the PPC considering error compensation compared to the non-compensation trajectory. Finally, a double-layer clay-printing experiment is conducted to validate the feasibility of the mechanism.