Geometric Guidance for Globally Synchronized Deployment of Elastic Geodesic Grids
For engineers simulating the deployment of elastic geodesic grids, this method provides a way to generate synchronized deformation trajectories that improve simulation robustness.
The paper introduces a geometric guidance framework for discretizing the deployment of elastic geodesic grids as synchronized, time-coupled deformation trajectories. The method produces compact displacement sequences that enable finite element simulations to avoid intermediate buckling and capture deployment-induced prestress.
Elastic geodesic grids deploy from flat to spatial configurations via complex nonlinear motion that is difficult to represent robustly for simulation. We present a geometric guidance framework that discretizes deployment as synchronized, time-coupled deformation trajectories. Starting from inverse tracing -- collapsing the deployed structure with a lightweight rod model while recording node paths under a shared parameter -- we obtain feasible node paths and formulate a polyline approximation problem that selects {globally synchronized} time steps and minimizes a robust tail-aggregated deviation measure under monotonicity constraints. {We solve the resulting non-smooth optimization problem via global optimization to obtain compact, synchronized displacement sequences for all paths simultaneously}. We evaluate the method using geometry-centric metrics (deviation versus step count, scaling with trajectory count) and demonstrate its utility by driving finite element deployment simulations that avoid intermediate buckling and capture deployment-induced prestress.