SHAPE CONTROL TO AVOID OBSTACLES OF SPINE-TYPE TENSEGRITY STRUCTURE BY POTENTIAL METHOD

Abstract

In the biomechanics field, tensegrity structures are considered to be similar to the human skeleton and the joint. Oh proposed a biotensegrity model that mimics the human spine and presented a shape control strategy, which leads to the optimization problem with the lengths of the tensile members corresponding to the muscle and tendon as design variables. This study extends previous shape control methods by incorporating strategies to avoid obstacles. As the methodology, the potential method, which has been applied in robotic engineering, is adopted. This method derives an appropriate avoidance path from the potential field function.