Architected balloons

Balloons and inflatable structures guarantee safe and non-threatening interactions with their surroundings. They are soft and smooth, easy to transport and to deploy but often lack mechanical stability. Yet, they are relevant solutions for human-robot interactions and for the robotic manipulation of fragile goods. Here we study how the addition of local surface artifacts, creating an architected material, can lead to tailor-made deployed geometry for tube like balloons while allowing to retain control over the mechanical behavior during deployment. We first characterize the mechanical behavior of large areas of architected materials (sheet and tubes) using a combination of experiments and numerical nonlinear homogenization methods. Several parametric microstructure geometries are then evaluated and combined to create a flexible geometric platform to adapt the deployed shape to each specific case. Finally, we propose a novel typology of inflatable which architectured material is locally optimized to create global form adequation with the target geometry and required deployed mechanical properties.