Biologically-Inspired Control for a Planetary Exploration Tensegrity Robot

Tensegrity structures are becoming increasingly popular as mechanical structures for robots. Their inherent compliance makes them extremely robust to environmental disturbances, and their design allows them to have a high strength-to-weight ratio whilst being lightweight compared to traditional robots. For these reasons they would be of interest to the aerospace industry, particularly for planetary exploration. However, being such compliant structures thanks to their network of elastic elements also means that their control is not an easy task. Relying solely on traditional control strategies to generate efficient locomotion would surely be near impossible due to the complex oscillatory motions and nonlinear interactions of its members. The goal of this project was to use bio-inspired control techniques to generate locomotion for a tensegrity icosahedron, namely the SUPERball project of the Intelligent Robotics Group of NASA Ames Research Center.