Claim: Kites in a MAWES need to be able to: CLAMP onto the tether and LATCH onto the previous kite + a discussion on how to do this + a first mention of stackable kites + a concept for automatic launch of a soft kite train

[Windy_Skies]

An alternative to clamps might be something like this, although to me that looks worse, heavier and more complex and much more draggy, than using clamps. Maybe it still needs winches and clamps to avoid slack lines while the shaft is folded in: From Paper to Bionics: Origami’s Incredible Impact on Science | FD Engineering

The shaft would start as a folded in helix, for example. You would start the rotation of the arms of the ground station, that would allow the kites to also start rotating and catch the wind. You then let the kites rotate more quickly than the arms of the ground station, which would unfold the shaft, in theory. You would probably need winches to fold the shaft back in.

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Or there’s this:

@Windy_Skies

[2] to make fatter dominoes and leave more clearance between them and allow them to move freely along the tethers, but now after unreeling the chain, block the dominoes from going back onto the drum and reel the tethers back in slightly to tension and stiffen the shaft, the same idea as this collapsible string toy

The interfaces between different dominoes could look a bit like those of the wing sections here:

@Windy_Skies

Adaptive Functional Structures inspired by Insect Wings | Talk

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Maybe related: ASME JMR - Wrench estimation and friction compensation tether units augmented to remote TDCRs

Abstract:
Remote actuated mechanisms that employ tendon sheaths or tether units can transmit mechanical force without directly connecting the actuators to the mechanism, but suffer from undesirable side effects like mechanical friction and induced external wrench disturbances on the distal side of the mechanism. In this work, a multiple shooting method is proposed as a superior method to the single shooting method to solve the Cosserat rod boundary value problems, to obtain the states of the system. With that, numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the difficulty of solving these boundary value problems, simultaneously showing the validity of the proposed approach. 2D reconstruction experiments were conducted to show shape reconstruction capabilities. Additionally, friction loss and 6-DOF wrench estimations were also experimentally validated with the proposed mathematical model with 0.1679N and 0.0401Nm for RMSE force estimation and torque estimation error respectively, while achieving a 3% mean absolute percentage steady state friction estimation error. Lastly, a modified resolved rates controller was applied to steer a remote tendon-driven continuum robot to compensate for friction loss for 3.1m long tether units.