Structure design and kinematic analysis of a class of ring truss deployable mechanisms for satellite antennas based on novel basic units

Abstract

Deployable mechanisms have attracted much attention because of their potential in the fields of aerospace. In this paper, novel basic units with good composability and deployable performance are proposed to construct regular polygonal prisms and ring truss deployable mechanisms. Structure designs of basic units and their constructed regular polygonal prisms are first presented to describe the mechanism principles. To study the mobility of deployable mechanisms, the basic unit and its sub-mechanism are separated to analyze. The degree-of-freedom (DOF) of the sub-mechanism is carried out by screw theory and then verified by line geometry theory. According to the number of independent parameters, all the basic units, polygonal prisms, and ring truss deployable mechanisms have one DOF. Afterward, a class of ring truss deployable mechanisms for satellite antennas is presented as candidates. The kinematic models of the basic unit and typical deployable mechanism are established to show the deployable performance. The deployable mechanisms proposed in this paper provide a well theoretical reference for the structure design of satellite antennas, which have a good application prospect in the field of deep space exploration.