Mechanical Design of the Six-cable Driven Parallel Mechanism in FAST Telescope

Abstract

A six-cable driven parallel mechanism is adopted for realizing the position and orientation control of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). The span of the cable driven parallel mechanism is 600m, which will be the largest cable robot in the world. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss mechanical design of the six-cable driven parallel mechanism. In this paper, dimension design based on its statics performance is adopted. More important, research development and results of the electrical and signal cable transmission method encourage the use of the large cable driven parallel mechanism. The expectation of this paper is to expand the application of the large cable driven parallel mechanism.