Tendon control deployment of tensegrity structures

In this paper we consider the problem of deployment of tensegrity structures. Our idea is to make use of a certain set of equilibria to which the undeployed and deployed configurations belong. In the state space this set is represented by a connected equilibrium manifold and can be completely characterized analytically. The deployment is conducted such that the deployment trajectory is close to the equilibrium manifold and the deployment time is minimized.