Bio-inspired pneumatic shape-morphing elastomers

A bio-inspired, high-authority actuator for shape morphing structures

Lightweight structures capable of changing their shape on demand are of interest for a number of applications, including aerospace, power generation, and undersea vehicles. This paper describes a bioinspired cellular metal vertebrate structure which relies on shape memory alloy (SMA) faces to achieve fully reversing shape change. The resulting vertebrate actuators can be combined with flexible ...

Bio-Inspired Generalized Global Shape Approach for Writer Identification

Writer identification is one of the areas in pattern recognition that attract many researchers to work in, particularly in forensic and biometric application, where the writing style can be used as biometric features for authenticating an identity. The challenging task in writer identification is the extraction of unique features, in which the individualistic of such handwriting styles can be a...

A Shape Memory Alloy-Actuated Bio-inspired Mesoscale Jumping Robot

Jumping may be considered to be quite a useful means of mobile robot locomotion, but acquiring a stable landing has been a difficult problem. This paper reports on the design, analysis, simulation and experiments of a mesoscale jumping robot that is capable of stable landing. A jumping mechanism inspired by jumping insects is introduced and an actuation scheme using only on...

Shape-Morphing Nanocomposite Origami

Nature provides a vast array of solid materials that repeatedly and reversibly transform in shape in response to environmental variations. This property is essential, for example, for new energy-saving technologies, efficient collection of solar radiation, and thermal management. Here we report a similar shape-morphing mechanism using differential swelling of hydrophilic polyelectrolyte multila...

Shape spaces from morphing