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Design of a novel cable-driven parallel robot for 3D printing building construction

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Abstract

A novel cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR), featured with a simple structure and energy-efficient driving mechanism, for 3D printing building construction is proposed, and details of the design methodology are presented. To overcome the limitation of the previous approaches, the CDPR is designed to operate with only five cables; hence, its structure is simplified. To avoid the interference with the building being printed, lower cables are placed on a plane parallel to the ground and they are controlled to move synchronously up and down according to the height of the building being printed. Tension distribution of the cables required for the operation is analyzed using the constrained optimization problem. Workspace determination is presented in consideration of the cable strength as well using the tension distribution analysis. A gravity compensation mechanism is proposed and applied to reduce the energy consumption. The validity of the proposed CDPR and design methodology is verified through the simulation.

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Data and material availability

For reasonable request, the datasets of the current study are available from the corresponding author.

Code availability

For reasonable request, the code of the current study is available from the corresponding author.

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Funding

This research was supported by grants (NRF-2020R1A4A2002855) from NRF (National Research Foundation of Korea) funded by MEST(Ministry of Education and Science Technology) of the Korean government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sejong University, Seoul, Korea

    Chang-Hwan Lee & Kwan-Woong Gwak

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  1. Chang-Hwan Lee
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  2. Kwan-Woong Gwak
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Contributions

Chang-Hwan Lee: formal analysis, investigation, software, writing original draft. Kwan-Woong Gwak: data curation, funding acquisition, resources, review, and editing.

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Correspondence to Kwan-Woong Gwak.

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Lee, CH., Gwak, KW. Design of a novel cable-driven parallel robot for 3D printing building construction. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 123, 4353–4366 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-022-10323-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-022-10323-y

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