Crawling Shelter
A Deployable Structure that Actively Chooses its Environment with Locomotion
2022
Individual
The everchanging built environment and human factors elicit more concerns about adaptivity. An architectural structure usually stays in position once constructed. Deployable structures provide a certain amount of flexibility before being mounted on site. In response to the adaptability challenge, I developed a physical prototype at the intersection of a deployable structure and a quadrupedal robot to actively relocate itself according to the environmental inputs. The actuated structure without a fixed foundation can use movements like crawling to search for surrounding objects. The digital model was calibrated based on explorations of physical conditions with the prototype to simulate types of gaits that can adapt to different constraints and environmental inputs. The prototype with more subtle movements can further be developed into a scaffold for a human-scale shelter.