Parallel Computation of Geometry Control in Adaptive Truss Structures

Abstract

The fast computation of geometry control in adaptive truss structures involves two distinct parts; namely, the efficient integration of the inverse kinematic dif ferential equations that govern the geometry control and the fast computation of the Jaco bian, which appears on the right-hand-side of the inverse kinematic equations. In this paper we present an efficient parallel implementation of the Jacobian computation on an MIMD machine. We obtain large speedup from the parallel implementation, which reduces the Jacobian computation to an O(M²/n ) procedure on an n-processor machine, where M is the number of members in the adaptive truss. The parallel algorithm given here is a good candidate for on-line geometry control of adaptive structures using attached processors.