Speaker
Katia Bertoldi
(Harvard University)
Description
Inflatable morphing matter represents a frontier in programmable architecture and soft robotics, enabling dramatic shape changes driven by simple pressure inputs. In this talk, I will present a unified vision for how instabilities and geometric design can be harnessed to create inflatable systems that morph, lock, and reconfigure on demand. Starting from the fundamentals of buckling, snapping, and bistability in curved membranes and shell structures, I will show how these nonlinear phenomena can be used not as failure modes, but as functional tools to decouple input (pressure) from output (shape), and achieve multistable target states.
Primary author
Katia Bertoldi
(Harvard University)
