Soft spherical tensegrity robots are novel steerable mobile robotic platforms that are compliant, lightweight, and robust. The geometry of these robots is suitable for rolling locomotion, and they achieve this motion by properly deforming their structures using carefully chosen actuation strategies. The objective of this work is to consolidate and add to our research to date on methods for realizing rolling locomotion of spherical tensegrity robots. To predict the deformation of tensegrity structures when their member forces are varied, we introduce a modified version of the dynamic relaxation technique and apply it to our tensegrity robots. In addition, we present two techniques to find desirable deformations and actuation strategies that would result in robust rolling locomotion of the robots. The first one relies on the greedy search that can quickly find solutions, and the second one uses a multigeneration Monte Carlo method that can find suboptimal solutions with a higher quality. The methods are illustrated and validated both in simulation and with our hardware robots, which show that our methods are viable means of realizing robust and steerable rolling locomotion of spherical tensegrity robots.

中文翻译：

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电缆驱动的软球形张拉整体机器人的滚动运动。

软球形张拉整体机器人是一种新型可操纵的移动机器人平台，具有柔顺、轻便和坚固的特点。这些机器人的几何形状适合滚动运动，它们通过使用精心选择的驱动策略适当地变形其结构来实现这种运动。这项工作的目的是巩固和补充我们迄今为止关于实现球形张拉整体机器人滚动运动的方法的研究。为了预测张拉整体结构在其成员力变化时的变形，我们引入了动态松弛技术的修改版本并将其应用于我们的张拉整体机器人。此外，我们提出了两种技术来找到理想的变形和致动策略，这将导致机器人的稳健滚动运动。第一个依靠贪婪搜索可以快速找到解决方案，第二个使用多代蒙特卡罗方法，可以找到更高质量的次优解决方案。在仿真和我们的硬件机器人中对这些方法进行了说明和验证，这表明我们的方法是实现球形张拉整体机器人稳健和可操纵的滚动运动的可行方法。