7. Conclusions and outlook

The application of tensegrity mechanisms to robotic manipulation offers many advantages: these systems are both light and strong, adapt to their environment and can be extensively reconfigured by remote actuation. These advantages derive from the fact that a tensegrity is a self-stressed system made up of a set of bars and cables subjected only to tensile and compressive forces.

Tensegrity implies the use of dedicated modeling and simulation tools, as a tensegrity is based on a so-called "morphological-mechanical" coupling that makes its shape dependent on its internal stresses. To this end, so-called form-finding methods are employed to determine the balanced configurations resulting from this coupling. The analysis of a tensegrity mechanism also requires the introduction of specific notions regarding their workspace and the determination of the stiffness of the...