Widespread push puppet toys within the shapes of animals and in style figures can transfer or collapse with the push of a button on the backside of the toys’ base. Now, a workforce of UCLA engineers has created a brand new class of tunable dynamic materials that mimics the inside workings of push puppets, with functions for mushy robotics, reconfigurable architectures and house 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 twine tension-based precept that controls a puppet, researchers have developed a brand new kind of metamaterial, a fabric 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 by 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 mushy robotics or different reconfigurable constructions:
- The extent of rigidity within the cords can “tune” the ensuing construction’s stiffness — a totally taut state affords the strongest and stiffest degree, however incremental adjustments within the cords’ rigidity permit the construction to flex whereas nonetheless providing power. The hot button is the precision geometry of the nesting cones and the friction between them.
- Constructions that use the design can collapse and stiffen time and again, making them helpful for long-lasting designs that require repeated actions. The fabric additionally affords simpler transportation and storage when in its undeployed, limp state.
- After deployment, the fabric displays pronounced tunability, turning into greater than 35 instances stiffer and altering its damping functionality by 50%.
- The metamaterial could possibly be designed to self-actuate, by synthetic tendons that set off the form with out human management
“Our metamaterial permits new capabilities, displaying nice potential for its incorporation into robotics, reconfigurable constructions and house engineering,” mentioned corresponding creator and UCLA Samueli College of Engineering postdoctoral scholar Wenzhong Yan. “Constructed with this materials, a self-deployable mushy robotic, for instance, may calibrate its limbs’ stiffness to accommodate totally different terrains for optimum motion whereas retaining its physique construction. The sturdy metamaterial may additionally assist a robotic raise, push or pull objects.”
“The final idea of contracting-cord metamaterials opens up intriguing potentialities on the best way to construct mechanical intelligence into robots and different gadgets,” Yan mentioned.
A 12-second video of the metamaterial in motion is accessible right here, by way of the UCLA Samueli YouTube Channel.
Senior authors on the paper are Ankur Mehta, a UCLA Samueli affiliate professor {of electrical} and laptop 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 response to the researchers, potential functions of the fabric additionally embody self-assembling shelters with shells that encapsulate a collapsible scaffolding. It may additionally function a compact shock absorber with programmable dampening capabilities for autos shifting by tough environments.
“Wanting forward, there is a huge house to discover in tailoring and customizing capabilities by altering the scale and form of the beads, in addition to how they’re linked,” mentioned Mehta, who additionally has a UCLA school 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 assist from the Air Power Workplace of Scientific Analysis, in addition to computing and storage providers from the UCLA Workplace of Superior Analysis Computing.
