Biotensegrity Inspired Robot–Future Construction Alternative

摘要

In the era of emerging technology, application of robotic and automation in multi discipline is expected. Civil engineers drastically accept and adopt robots in real world construction industry to assist workers in fatigue and harsh environment, concurrently improve the quantity and quality of the work with most likely lesser cost. Due to remarkable architecture, mechanics and advance features like lightweight, energy efficiency and flexibility; compatibility of tensegrity structures in robotic design will certainly enlighten the construction market. In particular, extra energy to maintain the tensegrity-based robot configuration under gravitational load is not required. Similarly to living organism, tensegrity-based robot generates global transformation with even tiny local pressure under low energy consumption, yet the subsequent configuration equilibrium can be sustained by its own. Will the integration between biology and tensegrity in robotics uphold the next generation of robots in construction industry? This paper provides understanding of biotensegrity principle and its potential to robotics particularly in inspection robots based on previous studies with the motive to encourage more researchers to work in tensegrity-based robot especially from biology perspective.