AirForce: Personal Fabrication of Large-Scale, Load-Bearing Animatronics Structures from a Single Tube

AirForce is a fabrication system that enables users to create large, load-bearing animated structures from a single continuous tube. It replaces traditional truss elements with folded tube segments and integrates pneumatic actuators into the same tube, enabling full structures to be built, animated, unfolded, and refolded with 100% material reuse. The system introduces three intergrated variants of pneumatic actuators: Buckling actuators for long push motions, Muscle actuators for pulling, Telescoping actuators for high-force output. These actuators, combined with a high-pressure lap-sealed tube design, can sustain 200 mBar and generate forces up to 480 N, 1420 N, and 2330 N. A Blender plugin helps design the tube-based truss, place actuators, and optimize airflow routing. It exports labeled instructions for sealing, constricting, folding, inserting inlets, and adding blowers. A companion app animates the final structures. AirForce enables lightweight, portable, and human-scale applications, demonstrated by a 6-DOF VR motion platform and an 8 m tall, 16 m long animatronic T-Rex.

Publication

Lukas Rambold, Robert Kovacs, Min Deng, Antonius Nauman, Konrad Gerlach, Horatio Montero Hamkins, Helena Lendowski, Chiao Fang, Shohei Katakura, Conrad Lemper, Muhammad Abdullah, and Patrick Baudisch. 2026. AirForce: Personal Fabrication of Large-Scale, Load-Bearing Animatronics Structures from a Single Tube. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'26)

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