Deployable Structure Animation with Kangaroo 2

[merve_özkahya]

Hi everyone,

I am working on deployable structures generated from arbitrary surfaces. I use a conical mesh to discretize the surface because of its geometric properties. From this mesh, I obtained the polygonal links and the dap links, as shown in the images.

Now, I would like to animate this deployable structure. For example, the middle polygonal link should remain fixed, while the others move relative to it.

Even though the system is overconstrained, it exhibits a single degree of freedom in reality. My understanding is that I should use the Kangaroo2 solver to simulate this motion, but I could not find any example similar to this type of linkage-based deployable system.

How should I set up the hinges, constraints, or rest angles in Kangaroo2 to achieve a proper kinematic animation? Any guidance or example would be greatly appreciated.

[DanielPiker]

Kangaroo can be useful for creating the conical/circular meshes to use for these type of structures, but once you have that, the actual motion of the structure is better constructed purely geometrically.
Here’s an old animation showing this from when I first found this linkage type. There is a point within each quad about which the panel can rotate and scale so that it stays touching the quad boundary. You can then invert this scaling so the panels keep their size and the structure as a whole expands.

Linkage motion

[DanielPiker]

Here’s another old animation showing the relationship between the circular mesh(red), its dual conical mesh(blue), and the linkage