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Rubbery Material for Soft Robotics Shape-Shifts into Complex Forms on Demand

A liquid crystal elastomer created at Rice University  can morph into any sort of sophisticated shape, from a human face to a rose. These complex forms are programmed into the material to appear at ambient, room-temperature conditions and then collapse into a flat sheet when heated. When heat is removed, the shapes display again. The material could be useful for soft robots that mimic organisms.

Topics:
Automation Materials Motion Control Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:02 the ability to just make materials that can change in any Shape you want is Pretty exciting you know I think a lot of people know the movie flubber you go and It's a Soft material that can change Shape in a way We're Trying to achieve that We're not quite there yet but I think we we got One step Closer So this one will take a little bit longer but you'll see it start to go

    00:00:24 flat on the edges first cu It's the Black Surf is heating up faster I work with Liquid Crystal asom So this is Liquid crystals embedded into polymer Network that feel similar to what a Rubber band is in terms of How strong It is and how stretchy it is um and these are the same Liquid crystals that you find in your LCD tvs or calculator screens so Liquid crystals are All

    00:00:45 Around you and What We're doing here is We're embedding it into this polymer Network so That's a liquor Crystal molecules all orienting We're able to control the Shape Of The material on a molecular level and so What's Happening when you Heat this material is the crystals are transitioning into a non Crystal phase just a disordered phase so these transition at around 80°

    00:01:10 C It's a phe change and it's completely reversible you can Heat It Up itl change Shape you cool it back it goes Back To where it started So I think There's lots of potential applications um so one is people always want tactile buttons for their smartphones so if you can have something that starts off That's low weight um That's initially a flat sheet and then can pop out

    00:01:30 could useful for many devices you can think sort bra Display for the visually are a lot of biomedical applications being explored so people are looking at for example if you Grow cells in a scaffold of these materials And you have this material change Shape and actuate during that Cell growth the cells will feel that and they respond to that and They grow in different ways and

    00:01:53 so There's potential there for tiss and cellular Engineering this could also be OT biomic applications Where If You're implanting in something into the body the body changes it grows and contracts as say Blood is pumped through a vessel so If you're able to have implantable material That's Soft similar to the mechanics of Natural Human tissue that can also Grow and expand with the body

    00:02:16 that could be very beneficial um so a lot of these applications are very far off but one of the Uh key Pieces that needed to be found was being able to program any Shape we need easily and so That's kind of the piece of the puzzle that we've been working on Here is figuring out If We want whatever Shape to happen to go from some unknown Shape a to unknown Shape B We can do that

    00:02:38 Pretty easily [âm nhạc] now