Control and simulation of a tensegrity-based mobile robot

Abstract

Tensegrity structures can provide a new approach to the construction of mobile robots with different shapes and properties that usual robots, wheeled or legged, do not have. Tensegrity are light, deformable structures that may be able to adapt their form to unconstrained environments. The main issue of this paper is twofold, first, to derive appropriate and general dynamic equations of motion to study the movement of such structures in the space; second to demonstrate, by means of simulation, that a tensegrity structure can execute any desired trajectory path by actuating some or all of its elements.