Acknowledgements
The authors are indebted to many people who greatly influenced the
research that eventually led to this book. First and foremost we would like
to thank Professor Sergio Pellegrino for guiding us into this exciting interdisciplinary area of deployable structures two decades ago. Many motion
structures introduced herein were originated from his pioneering work.
The authors are also grateful to Professors Christopher Calladine and
Tibor Tarnai, whose insight into many of the problems that we have
worked on and encouragement have inspired us to seek more elegant analytical solutions. Our collaborators – Nicholas Cole, Paul Kassabian, Alan
Kwan, Shiyu Liu, Yaozhi Luo, Decan Mao and Chaoyang Song, to name
just a few – have undoubtedly had an impact on the approach that has
been taken. The joint work has been extensively cited herein. Our gratitude also goes to Professor Guy Houlsby for his continuous support, to the
workshop of the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford,
for assistance in making the wonderful models, to Jennet Hovard and John
Mooney who produced the most of the superb photos for this book, and
to Joseph Gattas and Alison May who patiently read the first draft of the
book. Finally we would like to acknowledge the help, patience and encouragement provided by our editors at Spon Press, Tony Moore, Siobhán
Poole and Simon Bates.