The invention is a novel method and apparatus for optimal placement of actuators responsible for shaping of elastically deformable structures into desired target shapes using sparse number of actuators such that the discrepancy between deformed surfaces and target shapes is minimized. The invention utilizes a computational algorithm for optimal placement of actuators using particle swarm optimization, a biologically inspired evolutionary optimization paradigm that searches for the minima (or maxima) of objective functions with possibly large number of parameters.