Development of a planar cable-driven parallel robot for submillimeter and terahertz beam mapping measurements

The spatial sensitivity pattern of millimeter-wavelength receivers is an important diagnostic of performance and is affected by the alignment of coupling optics. Characterization can be challenging in the field, particularly in the decentered and tightly packed optical configurations that are employed for many astronomical millimeter-wave cameras. In this paper, we present the design and performance of a lightweight and reconfigurable beam mapper, consisting of a bank of thermal sources positioned by a planar cable-driven robot. We describe how the measurement requirements and mechanical constraints of the Tomographic Ionized-carbon Mapping Experiment optical relay drive the design of the mapper. To quantify the positioning performance, we predict the beam patterns at each surface to derive requirements and use a non-contact computer-vision-based method built on OpenCV to track the payload position with an accuracy better than 1.0 mm. We achieve an in-plane absolute payload position error of 2.7 mm (RMSE) over a ∼400×400mm workspace and an in-plane repeatability of 0.81 mm, offering substantial improvements in accuracy and speed over traditional handheld techniques.