A Flat Sheet Curls into a Dome on Its Own: Inverse Design of Polymer Tensegrity
A sheet of paper left on a wet table warps and lifts its edges. No one controls that motion, but it follows the same laws as plant growth: some areas of the sheet shrink more than others, and the flat form becomes three-dimensional. Engineers have long dreamed of taming this process so that a flat blank folds itself into a desired sculpture. In the new work, that trick succeeded with accuracy down to one percent.