This investigation by Kuan-Ting Lai, developed as part of his thesis on Reconfigurable Systems of Tensegrity at the University of Stuttgart, is an exploration of the capabilities of structural ...

A termite mound does not look engineered. It rises in rough, uneven towers, full of crooked passages and shifting pockets of air, yet it can regulate temperature, manage airflow and stay standing in ...

Catastrophic collapse of materials and structures is the inevitable consequence of a chain reaction of locally confined damage—from solid ceramics that snap after the development of a small crack to ...

The tensegrity technology allows minimum mass of both the habitat and the robotic system. This proposal solves three unsolved space travel problems: Their innovative tensegrity-based evolvable habitat ...

A team of researchers has developed a way to use 3-D printers to create objects capable of expanding dramatically that could someday be used in applications ranging from space missions to biomedical ...

Tensegrity structures comprise isolated compressive members suspended within a continuous network of tensioned elements, yielding lightweight yet remarkably resilient systems. The inherent self-stress ...

Much like sphere packing, crystalline materials can be similarly described via periodic packing of cylinders in 3D space. In this instance, the cylinders represented rods of strongly bonded atoms or ...

Engineers describe the creation of a new class of mechanical metamaterials that delocalize deformations to prevent failure. They did so by turning to tensegrity, a century-old design principle in ...