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. 2017 Jun 14;7:3511. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-03412-6

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Procedure for creating an active tensegrity. Deployment of an active tensegrity is based on the shape recovery property of shape memory polymers (SMP). (A) Schematic of the overall concept and design. (a) The struts, which are programmed to compact shapes, are connected by a network of elastomer cables. (b) Upon heating, the recovery of the struts to their straight shapes leads to actuation of the structure to a 3D resilient tensegrity structure. To achieve this concept, (c) the struts are designed to have tubular shapes with longitudinal slit portions and are 3D printed using SMPs; (d,e) the SMP struts are folded into compact shapes at a temperature that is above the glass transition temperature (T _g) of the SMP; (f) decreasing the temperature below T _g fixes the struts in the compact shapes, which are then assembled with the elastomer cables (g) according to the topology of the design to form a loose assembly (a); heating the assembly to a temperature above T _g leads the struts to their original shapes, and thus the constraints from the cables induce self-stress. As a consequence, a stable tensegrity structure is obtained. (B) The experimental result shows the deployment process. The scale bars represent 15 mm.