and Materials Conference and Exhibit

The tensegrity concept has long been considered as a ba-sis for lightweight and compact packaging deployable structures, but very few studies are available. This pa-per presents a complete design study of a deployable tensegrity mast with all the steps involved: initial form-finding, structural analysis, manufacturing and deploy-ment. Closed-form solutions are used for the form-finding. A manufacturing procedure in which the cables forming the outer envelope of the mast are constructed by two-dimensional weaving is used. The deployment of the mast is achieved through the use of self-locking hinges. A stiffness comparison between the tensegrity mast and an articulated truss mast shows that the tenseg-rity mast is weak in bending