Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Shape-shifting robots”.
Erik DEMAINE Hi, I’m Erik Demaine working with Professor Daniela Rus’s group at MIT and Robert Wood’s group at Harvard., We’ve been building a sheet of material that can fold itself into arbitrary origami without the origamist.. So here it is folding into a boat.. There’S little shape memory. Alloys to pull the creases shut like little muscles and magnets to hold the shape in place once you’ve gotten there., And that was making a book by sending one signal.. On the other hand, we can send a second signal and fold just along these two creases, making the first step in a paper airplane.
And then send it a third signal and we fold along these three creases and we get the paper airplane.. This is a challenge because we’re making compound folds folding one fold around another. And the vision is we have a programmable sheet that can fold into arbitrary 3D objects all by itself, building essentially a transformer .