Rolling Locomotion of Cable-Driven Soft Spherical Tensegrity Robots

Soft spherical tensegrity robots are novel steerable mobile robotic platforms that are compliant, lightweight, and robust. The geometry of these robots is suitable for rolling locomotion, and they achieve this motion by properly deforming their structures using carefully chosen actuation strategies. The objective of this work is to consolidate and add to our research to date on methods for realizing rolling locomotion of spherical tensegrity robots. To predict the deformation of tensegrity structures when their member forces are varied, we introduce a modified version of the dynamic relaxation technique and apply it to our tensegrity robots. In addition, we present two techniques to find desirable deformations and actuation strategies that would result in robust rolling locomotion of the robots. The first one relies on the greedy search that can quickly find solutions, and the second one uses a multigeneration Monte Carlo method that can find suboptimal solutions with a higher quality. The methods are illustrated and validated both in simulation and with our hardware robots, which show that our methods are viable means of realizing robust and steerable rolling locomotion of spherical tensegrity robots