Path Planning for Rolling Locomotion of Polyhedral Tensegrity Robots Based on Dijkstra Algorithm

Tensegrity-based locomotive robots have attracted more and more interests from multidisciplinary engineering community. To realize long distance locomotion for tensegrity robots in a given land, path planning is usually needed. This paper proposes a path planning approach for rolling locomotion of polyhedral tensegrity robots. Given the start vertex, target vertex and the directed graph G which indicates the possible paths, the optimal path with lowest cost can be found by Dijkstra algorithm. Numerical and experimental examples are carried out with a six-bar tensegrity robot prototype. Both motion distance and terrain characteristics are considered within the cost. The proposed approach is generally verified by the examples. A comparison between the numerical result and the experimental result is also presented.