Structural Design and Analysis of a Wire-Driven Robot with a Double-Wire Coaxial Drive Mode

Wire-driven robots have wide applications. The structure of the driver is simple but bulky, with too many motors and no tensioning mechanism. A driver for a dual-wire coaxial wire-driven robot is proposed. The principle is that the extension and contraction amounts of the mirror-symmetrically distributed driving wires are equal. Based on this principle, a wire-driven hyper-redundant robot and a continuum robot with a dual-wire coaxial driving method are designed, and their kinematic models are established and analyzed. Based on the design method, a hyper-redundant robot and a continuum robot with a dual-wire coaxial driver are fabricated, and their motion performance is tested. The test results show that the wire-driven robot based on the dual-wire coaxial driver conforms to the kinematic analysis, proving that the dual-wire coaxial driving method is correct and efficient.