Conventional planar pneumatic actuators have not been able to make the most of their thin, lightweight, and flexible nature due to tubes and pumps inevitably connected to them. In this paper, we build upon our prior work and propose Liquid Pouch Motors, a family of printable soft actuators that consist of one or more gas-tight bladders (called pouches) filled with low boiling point liquid. When the heat over 34 C is applied to them, the liquid inside the pouch evaporates and the whole structure inflates. Especially, we newly presented roll-to-roll mass production of Liquid Pouch Motors with the rectangular form factor in addition to the previously reported CNC heat drawing. We also discussed the suitable material selection and the volume of liquid needed for the actuators. Based on this fabrication procedure, we evaluated the mechanical properties of the proposed actuators. By leveraging the benefits of the actuators, we then implemented three shape-changing interfaces: (1) electrically driven printable paper robots combined with printed paper circuit; (2) an untethered architecture facade that passively actuates by ambient heat; and (3) dresses that change their color and texture by the incident light and the body temperature. We believe that Liquid Pouch Motors will work as a new toolbox for fabrication and application of soft actuators in interactive scenarios.

We propose Inkjet 4D Print, a self-folding fabrication method of 3D origami tessellations by printing 2D patterns on both sides of a heat-shrinkable base sheet, using a commercialized inkjet ultraviolet (UV) printer. Compared to the previous folding-based 4D printing approach using fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printers [An et al. 2018], our method has merits in (1) more than 1200 times higher resolution in terms of the number of self-foldable facets, (2) 2.8 times faster printing speed, and (3) optional full-color decoration. This paper describes the material selection, the folding mechanism, the heating condition, and the printing patterns to self-fold both known and freeform tessellations. We also evaluated the self-folding resolution, the printing and transformation speed, and the shape accuracy of our method. Finally, we demonstrated applications enabled by our self-foldable tessellated objects.

Untethered control of soft-bodied robots is attractive for interactions in a variety of unstructured and dynamic environments. However, soft robotics systems are currently limited in terms of wireless, selective, and scalable control of multiple actuators. Therefore, we propose a method to wirelessly drive multiple soft actuators by laser projection. A small amount of low-boiling-point liquid inside a planar thin pouch can be heated by a laser and evaporated to inflate the whole body. Laser projection enables both wireless energy supply and the selection of target actuators. Further, the low-boiling-point liquid serves as an actuation source and as a receiver of laser irradiation. Thus, we do not need additional components such as electric circuits and batteries to achieve simple and scalable implementation of multiple soft actuators. We evaluated the mechanical properties and demonstrated that the system can wirelessly control the gestures of fingers of a robot hand. We also verified that our method can activate a group of mobile soft robots simultaneously and individually while tracking the actuator positions. Our approach contributes to the scalable deployment of soft robotic systems by removing tethers for power and communication.

Despite the recent trend of computational origami for human-computer interaction (HCI) and digital fabrication, it is still difficult for designers to complete a series of design, simulation, and fabrication of objects leveraging computational origami theory. In this paper, we propose Crane, an integrated origami design platform implemented with Grasshopper. With this platform, users can seamlessly (1) design the 2D and 3D crease pattern, (2) simulate 3D folding transformation from the given crease pattern, (3) inversely find a new pattern under design constraints, (4) thicken the 2D pattern into a 3D volume along with the appropriate hinge structures for different fabrication methods, and (5) optionally connect the resulting design to other Rhinoceros or Grasshopper plugins for post-processes. To help understand how to use our system and demonstrate its feasibility, we showed three examples of origami products designed using our system. We also reported user feedback from the workshop as an evaluation.

Widespread research is being conducted on computational materials. The challenge for the realization of computational materials is how to weave computers into everyday objects consisting of various shapes and form factors. One idea to achieve this vision is to build physical computational particles that can cooperatively communicate among others and, thereby, change the whole shape like clay. Wireless communication and power transfer are keys to making such computing particles happen. Thus, we introduce an approach to embody these particles using multiple tiny IC chips, which wirelessly cooperate with each other. This article shows the current state-of-the-art wireless communication and power transfer technologies integrated into IC chips to achieve fine-grained shape deformation of computers. Moreover, this article also presents recent trends and future directions in shape-changing human–computer interfaces research.

Zippers have long been used for connecting and disconnecting two textiles repeatedly and easily. However, many industrial zippers cannot retain their shape after assembly, limiting the potential use of connecting soft textiles to form 3D shapes with large and various curvatures. Thus, we present a method to design and fabricate interlocking 3D printable zippers that can encode post-assembly shapes. The user first gives a target 3D shape divided into developable patches (i.e., curved surfaces unrollable like paper). Then, our design software built on Rhino/Grasshopper computes an interlocking zipper on the boundary curve of the patches. The user 3D prints the zipper in a flat state and welds it to the edge of the textiles by thermal bonding, which can zip into a target 3D shape. In this demo, we report our method and exhibit design examples of 3D printed zippers.