Frequent push puppet toys within the shapes of animals and fashionable figures can transfer or collapse with the push of a button on the backside of the toys’ base. Now, a staff of UCLA engineers has created a brand new class of tunable dynamic materials that mimics the inside workings of push puppets, with functions for delicate robotics, reconfigurable architectures and area engineering.
Inside a push puppet, there are connecting cords that, when pulled taught, will make the toy stand stiff. However by loosening these cords, the “limbs” of the toy will go limp. Utilizing the identical wire tension-based precept that controls a puppet, researchers have developed a brand new kind of metamaterial, a cloth engineered to own properties with promising superior capabilities.
Revealed in Supplies Horizons, the UCLA research demonstrates the brand new light-weight metamaterial, which is outfitted with both motor-driven or self-actuating cords which can be threaded via interlocking cone-tipped beads. When activated, the cords are pulled tight, inflicting the nesting chain of bead particles to jam and straighten right into a line, making the fabric flip stiff whereas sustaining its total construction.
The research additionally unveiled the fabric’s versatile qualities that might result in its eventual incorporation into delicate robotics or different reconfigurable constructions:
- The extent of stress within the cords can “tune” the ensuing construction’s stiffness — a totally taut state gives the strongest and stiffest degree, however incremental adjustments within the cords’ stress enable the construction to flex whereas nonetheless providing power. The bottom line is the precision geometry of the nesting cones and the friction between them.
- Buildings that use the design can collapse and stiffen over and over, making them helpful for long-lasting designs that require repeated actions. The fabric additionally gives simpler transportation and storage when in its undeployed, limp state.
- After deployment, the fabric displays pronounced tunability, changing into greater than 35 instances stiffer and altering its damping functionality by 50%.
- The metamaterial may very well be designed to self-actuate, via synthetic tendons that set off the form with out human management
“Our metamaterial allows new capabilities, displaying nice potential for its incorporation into robotics, reconfigurable constructions and area engineering,” mentioned corresponding writer and UCLA Samueli Faculty of Engineering postdoctoral scholar Wenzhong Yan. “Constructed with this materials, a self-deployable delicate robotic, for instance, might calibrate its limbs’ stiffness to accommodate totally different terrains for optimum motion whereas retaining its physique construction. The sturdy metamaterial might additionally assist a robotic carry, push or pull objects.”
“The final idea of contracting-cord metamaterials opens up intriguing prospects on easy methods to construct mechanical intelligence into robots and different units,” Yan mentioned.
A 12-second video of the metamaterial in motion is offered right here, through the UCLA Samueli YouTube Channel.
Senior authors on the paper are Ankur Mehta, a UCLA Samueli affiliate professor {of electrical} and pc engineering and director of the Laboratory for Embedded Machines and Ubiquitous Robots of which Yan is a member, and Jonathan Hopkins, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who leads UCLA’s Versatile Analysis Group.
In accordance with the researchers, potential functions of the fabric additionally embrace self-assembling shelters with shells that encapsulate a collapsible scaffolding. It might additionally function a compact shock absorber with programmable dampening capabilities for autos transferring via tough environments.
“Wanting forward, there is a huge area to discover in tailoring and customizing capabilities by altering the scale and form of the beads, in addition to how they’re related,” mentioned Mehta, who additionally has a UCLA college appointment in mechanical and aerospace engineering.
Whereas earlier analysis has explored contracting cords, this paper has delved into the mechanical properties of such a system, together with the perfect shapes for bead alignment, self-assembly and the flexibility to be tuned to carry their total framework.
Different authors of the paper are UCLA mechanical engineering graduate college students Talmage Jones and Ryan Lee — each members of Hopkins’ lab, and Christopher Jawetz, a Georgia Institute of Know-how graduate pupil who participated within the analysis as a member of Hopkins’ lab whereas he was an undergraduate aerospace engineering pupil at UCLA.
The analysis was funded by the Workplace of Naval Analysis and the Protection Superior Analysis Tasks Company, with further help from the Air Drive Workplace of Scientific Analysis, in addition to computing and storage companies from the UCLA Workplace of Superior Analysis Computing.
