filename     : Meg17a.pdf
entry        : inproceedings
conference   : SCA 2017, Los Angeles, United States, July 28 - July 30, 2017
pages        : 15:1–15:10
year         : 2017
month        : July
title        : Designing Cable-Driven Actuation Networks for Kinematic Chains and Trees
subtitle     :
author       : Megaro, Vittorio and Knoop, Espen and Spielberg, Andrew and Levin, David I.W. and Matusik, Wojciech and Gross, Markus and Thomaszewski, Bernhard and Bächer, Moritz
booktitle    : The Eurographics / {ACM} {SIGGRAPH} Symposium on Computer Animation
ISSN/ISBN    :
editor       : 
publisher    : Eurographics Association
publ.place   : Los Angeles, United States
volume       : 
issue        : 
language     : English
keywords     : 
abstract     : In this paper we present an optimization-based approach for the design of cable-driven kinematic chains and trees. Our system takes as input a hierarchical assembly consisting of rigid links jointed together with hinges. The user also specifies a set of target poses or keyframes using inverse kinematics. Our approach places torsional springs at the joints and computes a cable network that allows us to reproduce the specified target poses. We start with a large set of cables that have randomly chosen routing points and we gradually remove the redundancy. Then we refine the routing points taking into account the path between poses or keyframes in order to further reduce the number of cables and minimize required control forces. We propose a reduced coordinate formulation that links control forces to joint angles and routing points, enabling the co-optimization of a cable network together with the required actuation forces. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique by designing and fabricating a cable-driven, animated character, an animatronic hand, and a specialized gripper.