A craft that dates back thousands of years may hold the key to building tougher, more resilient robots and other modern technologies.
Inspired by prehistoric basketweaving, engineers at the University of Michigan have discovered that woven materials can bounce back from heavy compression while keeping their stiffness—qualities that could transform everything from robotics and exoskeletons to car parts and architecture.
The idea began when doctoral student Guowei Wayne Tu came across an article about baskets made as far back as 7500 BCE.
Tu and his colleagues wondered whether weaving survived across centuries not just for its beauty or practicality but also because of hidden mechanical advantages.
Working with associate professor Evgueni Filipov, the team set out to test whether weaving creates performance benefits that solid sheets of material cannot match.
They found that it does. Unlike flat, continuous materials that buckle and deform under pressure, woven structures can handle repeated compression and return to their original shape.
This combination of stiffness and resilience makes woven materials excellent candidates for use in soft robotics, protective exoskeletons, and other systems that need to be both lightweight and durable.
To test their idea, the researchers built woven structures using Mylar polyester ribbons—each about the width of a finger and as thin as a few sheets of paper.
These strips were woven together perpendicularly, much like basket fibers, and then assembled into three-dimensional structures called metamaterials.
Metamaterials are engineered composites whose unique structures give them properties not usually found in nature.
The team compared their woven designs with structures made from continuous sheets of the same Mylar. When both types were compressed, the differences were striking.
In one test, a rectangular woven box nearly 17 centimeters tall was squashed to less than 20% of its height and still returned to its original shape.
The continuous version, however, was permanently damaged after much lighter compression. High-resolution scans revealed why: woven materials spread stress across the whole structure, while continuous sheets concentrated stress in a few spots, leading to failure.
Strength tests also surprised the team. The woven structures were about 70% as stiff as continuous sheets, challenging the idea that woven systems are always flexible. In fact, one L-shaped woven piece, designed to mimic a robotic arm, could hold 80 times its own weight while remaining flexible enough to bend upward. A small four-legged woven “dog” prototype carried 25 times its weight and, when overloaded, bounced back into shape without losing strength.
The researchers envision many uses for this approach. They’ve already designed a concept for a woven exoskeleton that could support the human body, offering shock absorption in high-impact areas while allowing freedom of movement elsewhere. In the future, they plan to integrate smart electronic materials so woven robots and devices could sense their environments and adapt their shapes as needed.
What started as an ancient craft for making baskets may now guide the design of the next generation of resilient, shape-shifting machines.
