Motion Synthesis in Tensegrity Mechanisms

Lower weight and availability of multiple methods of changing the structure makes tensegrity mechanisms attractive for deployable mechanisms and robotics. Change of cable lengths is one way for these applications to be realized. It can allow a particular point in the mechanism to follow a certain path. This paper suggests three different methods of finding the sequence of cable lengths which achieves this path planning - parameter tuning, Probabilistic Global Search Lausanne (PGSL) and Simulated Annealing (SA). The NASA Tensegrity Robotics Simulator has been used for implementing these strategies in a three strut tensegrity simplex. The results suggest that parameter tuning is very slow. Amongst the other two, PGSL gives lower error and higher repeatability than SA.