A good example of an adaptive structure is the human body where the skeleton carries a wide range of loads and the muscles change its configuration to do so.
If the upper body did not adjust the centre of mass of the whole system slightly by leaning forward, the person would fall on their back.
In heavy engineering, there is already an emerging trend to incorporate activation into bridges and domes to minimize vibrations under wind and earthquake loads.
A lot of effort has been committed into adaptive aircraft wings to produce one that can control the separation of boundary layers and turbulence.
As space technology advances, some sensitive equipment (namely interferometric optical and infrared astronomical instruments) are required to be accurate in position as delicate as a few nanometres, while the supporting active structure is tens of metres in dimensions.
More precisely, we can say: We seek an active structure where actuation of some members will lead to a geometry change without substantially altering its stress state.
[2] Korkmaz et al. demonstrated configuration of active control system for a damage tolerance and deployment of a bridge.