Minimum Mass Design of Tensegrity Towers and Plates

Tensegrity structures are an emerging paradigm that facilitates the integration of structures and control technologies. We expect tensegrity to play a major role in future controlled structures and materials. In this paper we address the problem of designing tensegrity structures which possess minimal mass. We show that this problem can be solved analytically for regular and symmetric tensegrity towers and plates in a way that is essentially independent of the material properties. This is typical result in tensegrity systems, where the properties of the structure are greatly dictated by its geometry, hence being scalable, rather then by the choice of materials