Loop Shape Control of Stable Unit Tensegrity Structures

Tensegrity deployment is considered herein as a tracking control problem. Therefore, the required trajectories should be feasible for a given structure. For tensegrity structures, this means that in every desired configuration, the structure has to satisfy tensegrity conditions, which require strings to be in tension, and the structure to be stable. To define an open-loop deployment control law, geometry parameterization of those configurations and corresponding rest lengths of string elements guaranteeing equilibrium are defined first. By slowly varying desired geometry, an open-loop string rest length control is defined. This makes the structure track trajectories defined by the time dependent geometry parameters. Deployment of plates made of stable symmetric shell class tensegrity units is given as an example.