Cable-driven parallelrobots are a special Cable robots possess a number of desirable attributes including low inertial properties, high payload-to-weight ratios, potentially vast workspaces, traortability, ease of disassembly/reassembly, reconfigurability and economical construction and maintenance. However, relatively few analytical tools are available for analyzing and designing these manipulators. This thesis focuses on expanding the existing theoretical framework for the design and analysis of cable robots in two areas, namely,isotropic design and optimal design. Isotropic design of spatial cable-driven parallel robots is investigated by means of four different methods, namely, (i) symbolic method, (ii) geometric workspace, (iii) numerical workspace and global condition index (GCI), and (iv) numerical approach. Optimal design of cable robots is investigated by addressing the variation of the workspace, cable tension, stiffness and natural frequency indices using different geometric configuration, anddifferent sizes, and orientation of the moving platform. The power of this framework is that all the performance measures presented in this thesis have sense of physical consistency. Also, multi-objective optimal design of these manipulators is studied using a sequential algorithm method. We apply the aforementioned techniques to two types of spatial cable-driven parallel manipulators to obtain their isotropic postures as well as optimal design. These are a 6-6 cable-suspended parallel robot and a novelsapatial three-degree-of-freedom cable-driven parallel robot. Eventually, the results of isotropic conditions and optimal design of both cable robots are compared to show their applications.
