Why this matters
Traditional trusses are excellent at carrying load but terrible at changing shape. Once built, they’re essentially frozen in place—hard to deploy, harder to store, and impossible to reconfigure without taking them apart. In this project, I developed a method to turn ordinary triangulated trusses into compactly stowable, shape-morphing systems while preserving their stiffness and load-carrying capacity.
What I did
I started from standard triangulated trusses (Scissor, Fink, Warren, and topology-optimized designs) and systematically converted their triangular units into flat-foldable quadrilateral linkages. By introducing a new node on tensile members and enforcing the Grashof flat-foldability criterion, I derived closed-form rules for node placement that work for any triangle type. I then built an algorithmic workflow that scans a truss, identifies suitable members, inserts nodes, and outputs a reconfigurable version of the original structure with well-defined kinematic degrees of freedom.
Simulation, tools & prototypes
To study how these new trusses move and pack, I wrote a sequential kinematic simulator that actuates each degree of freedom and tracks changes in convex hull area and overall length. Across multiple examples, the transformed trusses can achieve up to a ~93% reduction in projected area when nearly fully actuated, while only modestly reducing span length. Finally, I validated the concept physically by fabricating and load-testing a tabletop cantilever and a three-meter-long Warren truss bridge, showing that the reconfigurable systems reach strengths and stiffnesses comparable to their static counterparts, but can still be folded for compact storage.