Study of configuration stability
Continuum Parallel Robots

This section describes the approaches used to study instability phenomena. The approaches differ according to the type of model used (continuous or discrete). As the continuous approach is rather complex, only its broad outlines will be discussed. The study of stability will focus more on the discrete case.

In all cases, a stable equilibrium of the CPP is necessarily a minimum of the potential energy (figure 13a), while an unstable equilibrium is either a maximum (figure 13b) or a saddle point (figure 13c), which may locally, at the limit of stability, turn into an isovalue of the energy (figure