Publication

A method to generate stable, collision free configurations for tensegrity based robots

Conference Article

Conference

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Edition

2008

Pages

3769-3774

Doc link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2008.4650881

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

Abstract

Tensegrity structures appeared in the science community about half a century ago, but they have already been applied to several heterogeneous research fields, such as architecture, civil engineering, space and even biology. Such structures keep a stable volume in space due to an intricate balance of forces between a disjoint set of rigid elements (bars) and a continuous set of tensile elements (cables).




The use of tensegrity structures in robotics is still new and there exist only a handful of works about this subject. Some of their main features such as light weight, flexibility, energetic efficiency and redundancy, make them interesting candidates for both mobile robots and manipulators. In this paper, a new method to detect and avoid both internal collisions between the structure members and external collisions with the environment is presented. In this way, we are providing a fundamental tool to develop more complete form-finding procedures and path-planning strategies for tensegrity structures.

Categories

nonlinear programming.

Author keywords

tensegrity frameworks, collision avoidance

Scientific reference

S. Hernández and J. M. Mirats Tur. A method to generate stable, collision free configurations for tensegrity based robots, 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2008, Nice, France, pp. 3769-3774, IEEE.