Tensegrity mechanisms are self-stressing mechanisms and it is known that the prestress of the elements affect the stiffness of the tensegrity. In this paper stiffness of a spatial tensegrity is studied for the purpose of the noise and vibration control and it is shown that an efficient variable stiffness element can be designed by using tensegrities. The antagonistic force and antagonistic stiffness are explained briefly and the kinematics of the tensegrity is analyzed. Also, the possible motion, the elastic stiffness, load stiffness and antagonistic stiffness formulation for the tensegrity are found symbolically. Some techniques for increasing the magnitude of the antagonistic stiffness are mentioned. The effect of the geometry on the stiffness, stiffness controllability and linearity are shown by examples. Finally, the results of this approach are verified by mechanical simulation of the designed tensegrity.
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