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China is now building the world’s largest single dish radio telescope in Guizhou province, which is called Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). The main purpose of this paper is to present an effective dimensional design method on the six-cable driven parallel manipulator of FAST. Sensitivity design method is adopted for the six-cable driven parallel manipulator of FAST. Cable has the capability to bear tension but not compression, so that cable driven parallel manipulator may not be controlled as expected if tension of one cable is small or zero. Therefore, for dimensional design of the six-cable driven parallel manipulator, three functions to evaluate tension performance were proposed. The tension performance functions can reflect the uniformity of cable tension and controllability of the six-cable driven parallel manipulator. According to the sensitivity design method and tension performance evaluating functions, a set of optimized dimensional parameters is calculated for constructing the six-cable driven parallel manipulator of FAST. In order to verify the optimization design result, a similarity model of the six-cable driven parallel manipulator was set up in Beijing. A serial of experiments shows that tension performance of the six-cable driven parallel manipulator satisfies the system’s requirement. More importantly, it provides a theoretical reference for further study on dimensional design of a cable driven parallel manipulator with large span.

In the last two decades, cable-driven parallel robots have attracted a lot of attention in robot community as a hot topic of robot research. In this paper, the development of the cable-driven parallel manipulator is first introduced in general. Second, the latest advance in theory and applications of cable-driven parallel manipulator is presented in detail, especially some notable implementations. Finally, an other probable application foresight with this cable manipulator is proposed and discussed.

The Feed Support System (FSS) addressed here is the receiver carrier of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China. The FSS is a complex hybrid manipulator, which consists of a cable-driven Stewart manipulator, an A-B rotator and a rigid Stewart manipulator. The cable-driven Stewart manipulator, which is a long-span flexible cable structure, is sensitive to the wind disturbance and induces the FSS vibration. The rigid Stewart manipulator is designed to suppress the vibration and improve the terminal accuracy of the FSS. In the paper, the elastic dynamic model of the cable-driven Stewart manipulator is deduced by simplifying the flexible cable as the spring damping model, while the rigidbody dynamic model of the A-B rotator and the rigid Stewart manipulator is obtained in detail, using the Newton-Euler method. The internal coupling forces of the FSS are figured out. The wind disturbance model is established according to the Davenport spectrum. By adopting the kinematic and dynamic parameters of the FAST prototype, the simulation model of the FSS is completed. Kinematic and dynamic vibration control strategies are evaluated with simulations. Results show that the dynamic vibration suppression strategy well satisfies the FSS terminal accuracy requirement,

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