In order to achieve high-precision pneumatic cylinder friction test, this paper proposes a new direct measurement method based on electric cylinder in which the axially acting forces from the compressed air in the two facing pneumatic cylinders cancel each other out and the detected value of the force transducer is just friction. For the sake of the implementation of the method, a new low-cost test method for identifying deadband of proportional directional valve was proposed, and a set of fuzzy PI constant pressure control system was designed to cope with a certain degree of leakage in the chamber. Based on the above, a friction test platform with two pneumatic cylinders facing each other was eventually built to study the influence of pressure, pressure difference, and piston speed on the friction of two commonly used different types of pneumatic cylinders. Through multiple sets of tests, it is found that when the lip seals are used in pairs between the piston and the inner wall of the cylinder, the friction between the piston and the cylinder is only related to the sum of the two chamber pressures, but not to the pressure difference between the two chambers. When the O-ring seal is used between the piston and the inner wall of the cylinder, the friction between the piston and the cylinder is related not only to the pressure of the two chambers, but also to the pressure difference between the two chambers. In addition, a series of comparative tests with the traditional single-cylinder friction test method directly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed new method.

As rigid robots suffer from the higher inertia of their rigid links, cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) are more suitable for large-scale three-dimensional (3D) printing tasks due to their outstanding reconfigurability, high load-to-weight ratio, and extensive workspace. In this paper, a parallel 3D printing robot is proposed, comprising three pairs of driving cables to control the platform motion and three pairs of redundant cables to adjust the cable tension. To improve the motion accuracy of the moving platform, the static kinematic error model is established, and the error sensitivity coefficient is determined to reduce the dimensionality of the optimization function. Subsequently, the self-calibration positions are determined based on the maximum cable length error in the reachable workspace. A self-calibration method is proposed based on the genetic algorithm to solve the kinematic parameter deviations. Additionally, the dynamic errors are effectively reduced by compensating for the elastic deformation errors of the cable lengths. Furthermore, an experimental prototype is developed. The results of dynamic error compensation after the self-calibration indicate a 67.4% reduction in terms of the maximum error along the Z-axis direction. Finally, the developed prototype and proposed calibration and compensation methods are validated through the printing experiment.