Research example:

Ben Peters’s Spiderbot is a concept for a large-envelope 3D printer, where the print head is suspended by cables from four fixed points. The print head has its own winches on board, and so the ends of the cables may be fixed to nearby tall sturdy objects like trees or buildings without any need for actuation at the affixing site. Peters describes some challenges with his design, including difficulty quelling oscillations that leads to lower-than-desired accuracy. I think this is an interesting prototype of an actuator type that might be used for a broad range of applications. It demonstrates that even simple, low-cost iterations of this can work.

See http://www.bnpeters.com/spiderbot.html for video (which is not embeddable here)