Patent attributes
A collapsible and deployable hierarchical open lattice assembly comprised of hinge boxes of 12 battens connected by hinge nodes. The hinge nodes are made of a plurality of resilient flexure joints, each joint connected to a batten and giving said batten a 90-degree in-plane rotation capability with a neutral-shaped flexure in a deployed state and a deformed-shaped flexure in a compressed state, whereby a restorative moment is created tending to return said flexure to its neutral state. One or more trusses are formed by sets of four longerons connected to the hinge boxes by the resilient flexure joints. Multiple hub boxes connected by longerons may be used to create a hierarchical truss of trusses in either two or three dimensions. These assemblies may be collapsed to a linear dimension by shearing the hub boxes and trusses in a parallelogram manner. The folding kinematics occur in three stages, which may be performed either sequentially or simultaneously. Initially the trusses connecting the hub boxes are sheared. Then the hub boxes and trusses are sheared in one common dimension to reduce the assembly to a two-dimensional, planar configuration. Finally the hub boxes and trusses are sheared in a perpendicular common dimension to reduce the assembly to a one-dimensional, linear configuration.
