UC Santa Cruz

Tensegrity-based structures hold promise for the field of lightweight, compliant robots. However, most prior efforts to model and plan the shape of these structures have focused on special cases or on static structures. This work attempts to generalize a dynamic-relaxation form-finding method into a form that provides solutions to problems analogous to Forward and Inverse Kinematics problems in serial-chain robots. Details of the implementation of these algorithms into a model tensegrity robot are also presented, as well as suggestions for experimental validation of results.