Scalable Soft Surface Capable of Reshaping Itself

Duke University researchers have tapped into a new potential for advanced fabrication with a thin, flexible material that is able to reshape itself and adapt to changing environments.

“We’re motivated by the idea of controlling material properties or mechanical behaviors of an engineered object on the fly, which could be useful for applications like soft robotics, augmented reality, biomimetic materials, and subject-specific wearables,” said Xiaoyue Ni  , assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke.

Transcript

00:00:15 Basically, the current existing morphing materials  are mostly programmed. It's like origami, right?   You set those creases and so this surface can  actually fold into a certain shape. So right now   we are trying to see okay whether we can control  the entire shape morphing processes instead of   like just controlling this like initial shape and  final shape. And so this is like uh why we want   to be able to program the shape in a real-time  fashion and so this is actually not a very easy   um idea for softer surfaces. Because uh  imagine that if you have a like a softer   blanket and you have some object underneath  but if you take that object out and if you   want to still maintain the shape of the blanket  in the same way and how are you going to apply   the forces or how are you going to deform them  to maintain that shape? It's actually a very   difficult problem. We call this the inverse  problem. So how to find the control signals  

00:01:15 to actually get the output shape that  we want is the key idea of this project.