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This work introduces a novel 12-motor paired-cable actuation scheme to achieve rolling locomotion with a spherical tensegrity structure. Using a new point mass tensegrity dynamic formulation which we present, we utilize Model Predictive Control to generate optimal state-action trajectories for benchmark evaluation. In particular, locomotive performance is assessed based on the practical criteria of rolling speed, energy efficiency, and directional trajectory-tracking accuracy. Through simulation of 6-motor, 12-motor paired cable, and 24-motor fully-actuated policies, we demonstrate that the 12-motor schema is superior to the 6-motor policy in all benchmark categories, comparable to the 24-motor policy in rolling speed, and is over five times more energy efficient than the fully-actuated 24-motor configuration. 

Human-centered design (HCD) offers a systematic approach to innovation practice, driven by customer research and feedback throughout the design process. Within the community of engineers and researchers who engage in design for global development, interest in HCD has grown in the past decade. In this paper, we examine the human-centered design for development (HCD+D) academic community to better understand the interactions between researchers. By building and evaluating a co-authorship network from a dataset of HCD+D papers, in which the nodes are researchers and the connecting links are co-authorship relationships, we provide a decade-long benchmark to answer a variety of questions about collaboration patterns within this emerging field. Our analysis shows that most HCD+D authors publish few papers and are part of small, well-connected sub-communities. Influential authors that bridge separate communities are few. HCD+D is emerging from disparate disciplines and widely shared scholarship across disciplines continues to be developed. Influential authors in HCD+D play a large role in shaping HCD+D, yet there are few authors that are in a position to connect and influence collaborative research. Our analysis gives rise to several implications including an increased need for cross-disciplinary collaboration and the need for a stronger core of HCD+D practitioners.