From material to robot and back again
The team of Princeton engineering created their own ‘transformers’
They used normal plastic combined with a custom made magnetic compound and a their origami knowledge. The result is a metamaterial that can have different shapes and movements all controllable with an external magnet field. They call their invention ‘Metabot’. From the researchers: ‘The metabot is a modular conglomeration of many reconfigurable unit cells that are mirror images of each other. This mirroring, called chirality, allows for complex behavior. Tuo Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher in Paulino’s lab said the metabot can make large contortions — twisting, contracting and shrinking — in response to a simple push.’
Geometry holds the key to the new material. The researchers built plastic tubes with supporting struts arranged so the tubes twist when compressed, and compress when twisted. In origami, these tubes are called Kresling patterns. The researchers created the building blocks of their design by connecting two mirror-image Kresling tubes at the base to make one long cylinder. As a result, one end of the cylinder folds when twisted in one direction and the other end folds when twisted in the opposite direction.
“You can transform between a material and a robot, and it is controllable with an external magnetic field,” said researcher Glaucio Paulino, the Margareta Engman Augustine Professor of Engineering at Princeton.
The simple pattern of repeating tubes makes it possible to move each section of the tube independently using precisely engineering magnetic fields. The magnetic field causes the Kresling tubes to twist, collapse, or pop open, creating complex behaviors. More about this subject on the Princeton Engineering website
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