In industries such as aerospace, architecture, and advanced engineering, there is a growing demand for adaptive structures that can change shape without losing mechanical integrity. Traditional shape-morphing systems often rely on periodic mechanisms that are vulnerable to failure, difficult to scale, and prone to distortion during motion. These limitations hinder their reliability in applications requiring high resilience, compact storage, and precise shape controls such as deployable satellite arrays, wind-adaptive building facades, and energy-efficient transportation components.
Our innovation—a Quasi-Periodic Shape-Morphing Mechanism Array based on Penrose Tiles—solves these challenges with a novel, fractal-inspired design. It uses non-periodic Penrose tiling to form a one-degree-of-freedom mechanical array that is lightweight, fault-tolerant, and scalable. Unlike conventional mechanisms, this system maintains geometric integrity during transformation and continues to operate even if individual components are damaged or removed. A physical prototype, built using laser-cut bi-color links, successfully demonstrated a 30.7% increase in area from compressed to expanded configurations, with all link motions synchronized through a single actuator and no distortion to the underlying lattice. This confirms its potential for low-power, high-precision morphing in next-generation aerospace, architectural, and smart material systems.
Photographs of the prototype in its a) largest and b) smallest configuration. The lattice, shown in blue, is determined by points fixed to each link. The lattice changes size and rotates but does not distort.