The superficial excitement behind Professor Heinrich Bülthoff’s cable-driven parallel robot simulator may mostly surround the implications to modern film and video game production, but the product of Tübingen’s Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics may yield much farther-reaching breakthroughs to extrapolate.
Publicly unveiled during Tübingen’s Driving Simulation Conference & Exhibition in September, the Cable Robot Simulator’s virtual reality headset adds an enhanced dimension to the directed movements of a mid-air suspended carbon fiber cage to reinvent and revise the standard expectations of a motion simulator’s workspace, acceleration and payload. It has the mechanisms and construction to possibly upstage traditional free-moving cable robots maneuvered with up to eighty combined winches and cables by instead incorporating eight winch-attached unsupported steel cables.
The combined rig’s 348 kW of drive power accelerates the cage at up to 1.5 times gravitational acceleration while the 80kg frame endures high dynamic loads along paths that can be programmed freely by reattaching the cables for new cabins and differing simulated scenarios. Adapting the entire contraption takes a total of just under an hour, and in the end, the cables can generate up to 1.5 tonnes of pulling force on the outer structure.
The ramifications of a rig this adaptable, maneuverable and durable to making driving and flight simulation and even theme park and video game experiences more deeply immersive are staggering. However, researchers are examining the added physical dimension to conventional virtual reality with some more practical implications. The belief is that such authentic simulations could facilitate incredible breakthroughs in understanding motion perception and furthering neurological research into unraveling common balance disorders.
Source – Technabob
