Kinetostatic Analysis and Solution Classification of a Planar Tensegrity Mechanism
This provides a method for analyzing tensegrity mechanisms, which are useful in applications like robotics, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific class.
The paper tackled the analysis of planar one-degree-of-freedom tensegrity mechanisms with three linear springs by deriving and solving kinetostatic equations, showing they can have up to six equilibrium configurations with one or two stable ones.
Tensegrity mechanisms have several interesting properties that make them suitable for a number of applications. Their analysis is generally challenging because the static equilibrium conditions often result in complex equations. A class of planar one-degree-of-freedom (dof) tensegrity mechanisms with three linear springs is analyzed in detail in this paper. The kinetostatic equations are derived and solved under several loading and geometric conditions. It is shown that these mechanisms exhibit up to six equilibrium configurations, of which one or two are stable. Discriminant varieties and cylindrical algebraic decomposition combined with Groebner base elimination are used to classify solutions as function of the input parameters.