Robotic Materials

Electriflow: Soft Electrohydraulic Building Blocks for Prototyping Shape-changing Interfaces

2021

Conference Paper

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We present Electriflow: a new class of soft electrohydraulic actuators as building blocks for prototyping shape-changing interfaces. These actuators are silent and fast in operation and can be fabricated with commodity materials. Electriflow generates an immediate hydraulic force upon electrostatic activation without an external fluid supply source, enabling a simple and compact self-contained design. This paper describes the materials and mechanisms of these shape-changing building blocks, as well as the underlying fabrication process, which includes a software tool that assists in their design, shape visualization and construction. Finally, we explore four classes of application prototypes: tangible animation, actuating origami creases, shape-changing phone, and shape-changing bowl.

Author(s): Purnendu and Sasha M. Novack and Eric Acome and Christoph Keplinger and Mirela Alistar and Mark D. Gross and Carson Bruns and Daniel Leithinger
Book Title: DIS ’21: Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021
Pages: 1280--1290
Year: 2021
Month: June
Day: 28
Publisher: ACM
Department(s): Robotic Materials
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
Paper Type: Conference
DOI: 10.1145/3461778.3462093
Event Name: Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS 2021)
Event Place: Virtual Event
Address: New York, NY
ISBN: 978-1-4503-8476-6
URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3461778.3462093
Additional (custom) Fields:
acknowledgments: This work was supported by funding from the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. We thank Nivedita Arora for valuable suggestions in the draft and proof-reading.

BibTex 

@inproceedings{Keplinger21-DISC-Electriflow,
  title = {Electriflow: Soft Electrohydraulic Building Blocks for Prototyping Shape-changing Interfaces},
  author = {Purnendu and Novack, Sasha M. and Acome, Eric and Keplinger, Christoph and Alistar, Mirela and Gross, Mark D. and Bruns, Carson and Leithinger, Daniel},
  booktitle = {DIS '21: Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021},
  pages = {1280--1290},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {New York, NY},
  month = jun,
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.1145/3461778.3462093},
  url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3461778.3462093},
  month_numeric = {6}
}