A Building in a Backpack

Material created by scientists from the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard features a thin-walled structure based on an origami technique called snapology.

The resulting structure is an extended cube with 24 faces and 36 edges and can be used to make a foldable and reprogrammable object that can be altered in shape, volume and stiffness. The structure can be continuously controlled and tuned.

Embedded in the structure are pneumatic actuators that can be programmed to form or deform different hinges to achieve the desired shape of the cube without external stimulus. The material can be embedded with almost any type of actuator, thermal, water or dielectric to create a deployable and transformable structure. As the structure changes shape, so do its properties: in some forms it will be stiffer, in others more pliable.

The team envisions the system could be stored in a backpack and opened to create temporary housing. It could also be used to create adaptive building facades or retractable roof systems. The researchers say they have demonstrated the scalability of the system. It can be created on the nanoscale for use as surgical stents or on a large scale to generate domes for disaster relief that can be shipped flat, then opened on-site.