DropPop: Designing Drop-to-Deploy Mechanisms with Bistable Scissors Structures

Yibo Fu, Emily Guan, Jianzhe Gu, Dinesh K Patel, Justin U Soza Soto, Yichi Luo, Carmel Majidi, Josiah Hester, Lining Yao. ACM UIST 2025. PDF | DOI

Deployable structures often rely on complex deployment mechanisms such as external pneumatic pumps, electric motors, or manual assembly. These conventional methods, which are intended for applications in shape morphing architectures, robotics, and product design, can be bulky and unwieldy for everyday interaction and daily use. We introduce a new class of deployable structures that harness the locomotion of a single bistable cap to drive the expansion of a scissor-like mechanism. Such structures can be rapidly deployed (0.2-0.7s) upon a small trigger, and stabilize themselves requiring no sustained energy input. We explore various input modalities for deployment such as hand dropping, and drone deployment, and showcase demo applications. Additionally, we provide a computational design tool for customizing shape primitives with physics simulation and offer design guidelines for fabrication.