Equilibrium conditions of a tensegrity structure

This paper characterizes the necessary and sufficient conditions for tensegrity equilibria. Static models of tensegrity structures are reduced to linear algebra problems, after first characterizing the problem in a vector space where direction cosines are not needed. This is possible by describing the components of all member vectors. While our approach enlarges (by a factor of 3) the vector space required to describe the problem, the advantage of enlarging the vector space makes the mathematical structure of the problem amenable to linear algebra treatment. Using the linear algebraic techniques, many variables are eliminated from the final existence equations. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.