At a research facility near Montpellier in southern France, a mock-up of a heavy airplane wing is carefully manouevred across a test centre by automated machinery.

The operation is part of unique research that could ultimately play a part in keeping jobs in heavy industry in Europe.

The lifting machinery is a cable-driven robot, specially designed with accuracy and adaptability in mind, as CNRS/LIRMM Robotics researcher Marc Gouttefarde explains:

“Cables are very flexible components. They can only draw the platform; they can’t push it. So one of our challenges is to keep all the cables tight. The basic principle of a cable-driven robot is very simple. But if your goal is to perform a certain number of demanding tasks like going fast, holding heavy loads or being very accurate, that’s when you have challenges. To address those challenges, we turn to mathematics, to design the robot and to control it”.

Flexible friends
The prototype has been designed by scientists at a Eu