Design and Analysis of a Wire-Driven Parallel Mechanism for Low-Gravity Environment Simulation

Traditional simulation mechanisms are unable to meet the simulation requirements of spacecraft launcher in low-gravity environment, like in the Moon. Based on the advantages of wire-driven parallel mechanism, a 6-DOF low-gravity environment simulation device with eight wires is designed in this paper. Firstly, the configuration and dimensional design of this wire-driven parallel mechanism are carried out. To operate and control the wire-driven parallel mechanism, a force distribution algorithm is introduced and the workspace is analyzed. Then, an evaluation index named quality index is established in order to study the performance of the wire-driven parallel manipulator in its workspace and reasonable tension is obtained after analyzing the influence on quality index caused by different wire tension.