Deployable Cuboctahedrons for Adaptive Space Infrastructure

Diverse space infrastructure is required for exploration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. However, the cost of sending materials into space is high. One approach to ease this cost is the use of adaptive infrastructure, which may leverage discrete building blocks that can be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled into diverse mechanical structures based on the relevant environment and task demands. Indeed, the NASA Automated Reconfigurable Mission Adaptive System (ARMADAS) project is taking this approach. The discrete building component selected by ARMADAS engineers is a cuboctahedron, or more simply a “voxel,” as a volumetric pixel. The voxels are lightweight and simple, and assemble into programmable mechanical metamaterial structures with high stiffness and stability. However, transportation of complete voxels remains volume-inefficient, and fabrication of voxels in-situ adds notable complexity to the system. Herein, we introduce a cuboctahedron voxel design that compresses to 35% of its deployed volume during transport and passively locks in its expanded state at its destination, where a multitude of voxels can then be assembled. Inspired by the Hoberman sphere, the voxel is designed to deploy using a 1D force input. We further confirm that the new deployable voxel is compatible with existing ARMADAS assembly agents.