Tensegrity structures: from theory to design and implementation

Despite the surge of interest in tensegrity structural systems and their deployment and control capabilities in the last few decades, only a few of these structures have indeed been realized until present. Moreover, most of the realized structures only take advantage of the static properties of these structures, although recently, some dynamic applications, such as in the three-DOF actuated robots and tensegrity mobile robot, have been implemented. In this presentation, we shall demonstrate the feasibility of realizing different tensegrity structures using the same set of structural members and an initial structural configuration. In particular, the tensegrity configuration to be considered is the configuration of the simplest form of tensegrity structures commonly called the simplex. Details of the hardware, hardware configuration, the design of the tension and compression structural members and the employed control techniques will be presented. In addition, the techniques for form-finding and deployment of a simple mono-stable and a more complex multi-stable tensegrity structures will be shown and a demonstration on how the multi-stable structure can used to carry out translation along these three Cartesian axes as well as rotations about these axes will be carried out from a Graphical User Interface developed in MATLAB. The physical realization of the multi-stable tensegrity structure is an important achievement and a unique contribution of this present work in the design of tensegrity structural systems. The approach that made this practical realization possible is the novel technique employed in varying the stiffness of some of the structural members. Also, we shall describe a collision avoidance technique that may be employed in the design of controlled tensegrity structural systems.