Ugh, emergency shelter? We already have 50 million emergency shelter designs. It's ok to say this has no practical uses but is very cool.

It's a science fair project. It's part of the rubric. More broadly it's a scène à faire (an obligatory genre trope) for academic writing.

> It's ok to say this has no practical uses but is very cool.

Agreed. But it doesn't go viral as much. Every cool robotics research goes with a comment that says "it could be useful for disaster response in a post-apocalyptic world where the conditions have changed in such a way that only my robot can save us".

It can hold a considerable amount of weight then that may have application for areas where sand, snow or even rocks may be a problem