CafkNet: GNN-Empowered Forward Kinematic Modeling for Cable-Driven Parallel Robots

Cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) have gained significant attention due to their promising advantages. When deploying CDPRs in practice, the kinematic modeling is a key question. Unlike serial robots, CDPRs have a simple inverse kinematics problem but a complex forward kinematics (FK) issue. So, the development of accurate and efficient FK solvers has been a prominent research focus in CDPR applications. By observing the topology within CDPRs, in this paper, we propose a graph-based representation to model CDPRs and introduce CafkNet, a fast and general FK solving method, leveraging Graph Neural Network (GNN) to learn the topological structure and yield the real FK solutions with superior generality, high accuracy, and low time cost. CafkNet is extensively tested on 3D and 2D CDPRs in different configurations, both in simulators and real scenarios. The results demonstrate its ability to learn CDPRs' internal topology and accurately solve the FK problem. Then, the zero-shot generalization from one configuration to another is validated. Also, the sim2real gap can be bridged by CafkNet using both simulation and real-world data. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first study that employs the GNN to solve the FK problem for CDPRs.