Amazing stuff! What about kitchen towels?
"South Korean engineers have developed a flexible robotic sheet which can grasp objects and move across surfaces – useful skills for applications in healthcare, exploration and haptic displays where users can “feel” virtual stimuli. ...
The new robotic folding sheet is made with heat-sensitive electrical elements which are distributed across a flexible, layered square of material with 6.3cm sides. The flexible layers are the high-performance polymers polyimide and polydimethylsiloxane.
A total of 308 resistors placed on the square act as heaters and sensors allowing for both precise movement control and continuous adjustment based on feedback from the sensors.
When the resistors embedded in the material heat up, the material undergoes thermal expansion causing it to transform its shape. This shape-shifting can be programmed to fulfill different functions such as locomotion or gripping. ..."
"... However, existing folding mechanisms have fixed hinges and folding directions, requiring redesign and reconstruction every time the environment or task changes. A Korean research team has now developed a “field-programmable robotic folding sheet” that can be programmed in real time according to its surroundings, significantly enhancing robots’ shape-morphing capabilities and opening new possibilities in robotics. ..."
From the abstract:
"Shape transformation by folding showcases intricate geometrical change over dimension, that has long provided the embodied intelligence of autonomous systems capable of adapting to challenging environments and displaying functional versatilities. Hinge-face material assembly interfaced by shape-morphing mechanisms produced the associated means. However, the fixed hinge structure limits the accessible modes of folding configurations despite the existing capability of rectification in plant.
Here we introduce a programming strategy of the two-dimensional fold of a robotic sheet into an unbounded set of hinge configurations in the field post-deployment, which is referred to as being field-programmable, driven by a densely distributed electro-thermo-responsive system design.
An interconnected set of metallic resistors, incorporated into the thermo-responsive polymer film, performs the dual functionalities of a heater and thermoreceptor, selectively recruited to configure folds through electronic modulation of its electrical power distribution.
Electronic layouts, computational algorithms, and closed-loop control schemes present an intuitive means of blending user intent in situ, yielding a servoed, swift, and robust fold-programming process. The system is intrinsically driven by embeddable electronics to enable autonomous system engineering, as potentiated by multi-purpose applications in grasping and locomotion."
KAIST Develops ‘Real-Time Programmable Robotic Sheet’ That Can Grasp and Walk on Its Own
Fig. 1: Field-programmable robotic folding sheet.
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