softrobotcritics

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Ferrofluid sculpting, some references

References Blaney, A., 2020. Designing Parametric Matter: Exploring Adaptive Self-Assembly Through Tuneable Environ- ments. Lancaster University (United Kingdom).

Bowers, J. The logic of annotated portfolios: communicating the value of’research through design’. Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 2012 Newcastle, UK. ACM, pp.68-77.

EDGEXPO. Fashion Industry Waste Statistics [Online]. Available: https://edgexpo.com/fashion-indus- try-waste-statistics/ [Accessed 18 Feb 2021].

Fletcher, K. 2008. Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys, London, Earthscan.

Gaver, W. What should we expect from research through design? In: Konstan, J., A., ed. SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems May 2012 Austin, Texas, USA. ACM, pp.937-946.

Oh, K. W., Kak, N. & Chinsung, P. 2005. A phase change microvalve using a meltable magnetic material: fer- ro-wax. 9th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences.

Raj, M. K. & Lennon, J. 2001. Ferrofluid sculpting apparatus. USA patent application.

Riesener, M., Schuh, G., Dölle, C. and Tönnes, C., 2019. The digital shadow as enabler for data analytics in prod- uct life cycle management. Procedia CIRP, 80, pp.729-734.

Stahel, W. R. 2001. From ‘design for environment’ to ‘designing sustainable solutions’. In: Tolba, M. K. (ed.) Our Fragile World: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development. EOLSS Publications.

Scott, J. Responsive Knit: the evolution of a programmable material system. In: STORNI, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Bohemia, E., and Lloyd, P, ed. DRS 2018: Design as a catalyst for change, 2018 Limerick, Ireland. pp.1800-1811.

Stahel, W. R. 2016. The Circular Economy. 531. Available: https://www.nature.com/news/the-circular-econo- my-1.19594 [Accessed 21/02/2021].

Star, S. L. & Griesemer, J. R. 1989. Institutional ecology,translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and pro- fessionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social studies of science, 19, pp.387-420. Tibbits, S. 2014. Fluid Crystallization: Hierarchical Self-Organization. In: Gramazio, F., Kohler, M. & Langenberg, S. (eds.) FABRICATE 2014: Negotiating Design & Making. UCL Press.

Tibbits, S. 2016. Self-Assembly Lab: Experiments in Programming Matter, Routledge. WRAP. 2020. Textiles [Online]. Available: https://wrap.org.uk/resources/guide/textiles [Accessed 18th Feb

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"Macchine Inutili 2025," an erudite homage to Bruno Munari among other kinetic artists

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Once a pro, always a pro.

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Puppets as exoskeletons

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*Puppets, robots, engineering

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Charles Babbage dabbling in entertainment devices

*In which Charles Babbage makes a half-hearted effort to build some popular-entertainment kinetic-art computational contraptions.

http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/16/babbages-dancer-by-simon-schaffer/

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Calculator or Dancer?

‘They needed a calculator, but a dancer got the job’ (The Marriage of Figaro, 1784)

In the steam-punk metropolis of Gibson and Sterling’s Difference Engine, the sickly Keats runs a cinema, Disraeli is a gossip journalist unwillingly converted to using a keyboard, and fashionable geologists visit the Burlington Arcade to buy pricey mechanical trinkets, ‘outstanding pieces of British precision craftsmanship’. Above them looms Lord Babbage, his original calculating engines already outdated, his scheme for life peerages on merit become part of everyday politics. Babbage’s dreams doubtless deserve this treatment from the apostles of cyberfiction – he touted his schemes in pamphlets and exhibitions all over early nineteenth century London. It was a city apparently obsessed by displays of cunning engines, enthusiastic in its desire to be knowingly deceived by the outward appearance of machine intelligence, and Babbage heroically exploited the obsession in his lifelong campaign for the rationalisation of the world.

The enterprise of the calculating engines was certainly dependent on the city’s workshops, stocked with lathes, clamps and ingenious apprentices, and on government offices, stocked with ledgers, blue books and officious clerks – a heady mixture of Bleeding Heart Yard and the Circumlocution Office. But, as Gibson and Sterling see so acutely, it was also tangled up with the culture of the West End, of brightly lit shops and showrooms, of front-of-house hucksters and backroom impresarios. Put the Difference Engine in its proper place, perched uneasily between Babbage’s drawing room in wealthy Marylebone, the Treasury chambers in Whitehall, and the machine shops over the river in Lambeth, but at least as familiar in the arcades round Piccadilly and the squares of Mayfair, where automata and clockwork, new electromagnetic machines and exotic beasts were all put on show.

It was in the plush of the arcades that Babbage, barely eight years old, first saw an automaton. Some time around 1800 his mother took him to visit the Mechanical Museum run by the master designer John Merlin in Prince’s Street, just between Hanover Square and Oxford Street. A Liègeois in his mid-sixties, working in London for four decades, Merlin was one of the best-known metropolitan mechanics, deviser of new harpsichords and clocks, entrepreneur of mathematical instruments and wondrous machines. His reputation even rivalled that of Vaucanson, the pre-eminent eighteenth century designer of courtly automata. As he rose through fashionable society, Merlin hung out with the musical Burney family, figured largely as an amusing and eccentric table-companion, and ‘a very ingenious mechanic’, in Fanny Burney’s voluminous diaries, sat for Gainsborough, and used his mechanical skills to devise increasingly remarkable costumes for the innumerable masquerades then charming London’s pleasure-seekers. To help publicise his inventions, Merlin appeared at the Pantheon or at Ranelagh dressed as the Goddess Fortune, equipped with a specially designed wheel or his own newfangled roller-skates, as a barmaid with her own drink-stall, or even as an electrotherapeutic physician, shocking the dancers as he moved among them.

Merlin ingeniously prowled the borderlands of showmanship and engineering. He won prestigious finance from the backers of Boulton and Watt’s new steam engines. He opened his Mechanical Museum in Hanover Square in the 1780s. For a couple of shillings visitors could see a model Turk chewing artificial stones, they might play with a gambling machine, see perpetual motion clocks and mobile bird cages, listen to music boxes and try the virtues of Merlin’s chair for sufferers from gout. After unsuccessfully launching a plan for a ‘Necromancic Cave’, featuring infernal mobiles and a fully mechanized concert in the Cave of Apollo, he began opening in the evenings, charged his visitors a shilling a time for tea and coffee, and tried to pull in ‘young amateurs of mechanism’.

Babbage was one of them. Merlin took the young Devonshire schoolboy upstairs to his backstage workshop to show some more exotic delights. ‘There were two uncovered female figures of silver, about twelve inches high’. The first automaton was relatively banal, though ‘singularly graceful’, one of Merlin’s well-known stock of figures ‘in brass and clockwork, so as to perform almost every motion and inclination of the human body, viz. the head, the breasts, the neck, the arms, the fingers, the legs &co. even to the motion of the eyelids, and the lifting up of the hands and fingers to the face’. Babbage remembered that ‘she used an eye-glass occasionally and bowed frequently as if recognizing her acquaintances’. Good manners, it seemed, could easily be mechanized. But it was the other automaton which stayed in Babbage’s mind, ‘an admirable danseuse, with a bird on the forefinger of her right hand, which wagged its tail, flapped its wings and opened its beak’. Babbage was completely seduced. ‘The lady attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible’. ‘At Merlin’s you meet with delight’, ran a contemporary ballad, and this intriguing mixture of private delight and public ingenuity remained a powerful theme of the world of automata and thinking machines in which Babbage later plied his own trade.

Merlin died in 1803, and much of his Hanover Square stock was sold to Thomas Weeks, a rival ‘performer and machinist’ who had just opened his own museum on the corner of Tichborne and Great Windmill Streets near the Haymarket. The danseuse went too. The show cost half-a-crown, in a room over one hundred feet long, lined in blue satin, with ‘a variety of figures inert, active, separate, combined, emblematic and allegoric, on the principles of mechanism, being the most exact imitation of nature’. Like Merlin, Weeks also tried to attract invalids, emphasising his inventions of weighing-machines and bedsteads for the halt and the lame. There were musical clocks and self-opening umbrellas, and, especially, ‘a tarantula spider made of steel, that comes independently out of a box, and runs backwards and forwards on the table, stretches out and draws in its paws, as if at will. This singular automaton that has no other power of action than the mechanism contained in its body, must fix the attention of the curious’.

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The obscure objects of desire embodied in the automata were never self-evidently distinct from any of Babbage’s projects. For example, like the automata of Cox, Merlin and Weeks, the Difference Engine apparently was also an object of fascination to the Chinese, and one visitor from China asked Babbage whether it could be reduced to pocket-size. Babbage replied that ‘he might safely assure his friends in the celestial empire that it was in every sense of the word an out-of-pocket machine’. Indeed, in the later 1840s, when all his engine schemes had run into the sand, he cast about for new ways of raising money to revive them, including writing novels, but was dissuaded because he was told he’d surely lose money on fiction. One such entirely abortive scheme involved designing an automaton ‘to play a game of purely intellectual skill successfully’. This was at least partly an attempt to assert the very possibility of building an automatic games-player. Babbage knew, at least at second-hand, of just how seductive gambling could be – his close friend Ada Lovelace, Gibson and Sterling’s dark lady of the Epsom motor-races, lost more than £3000 on the horses during the later 1840s. ‘Making a book seems to me to be living on the brink of a precipice’, she was told by her raffish gambling associate Richard Ford in early 1851.

The Games Machine

Babbage’s attention turned to the prospects of a games machine. In a brief memorandum, he demonstrated that if an automaton made the right first move in a game of pure skill with a finite number of possible moves at each stage, the machine could always win. Such a device, he reckoned, must possess just those faculties of memory and foresight which he always claimed were the distinctive features of his Analytical Engine, the features which made it intelligent. So Babbage began to design an automaton which could win at noughts-and-crosses, planning to dress it up ‘with such attractive circumstances that a very popular and profitable exhibition might be produced’. All his memories of Merlin, Weeks and the Regency world of mechanical wonders came into play. As he reminisced in his 1864 autobiography, ‘I imagined that the machine might consist of the figures of two children playing against each other, accompanied by a lamb and a cock. That the child who won the game might clap his hands whilst the cock was crowing, after which, that the child who was beaten might cry and wring his hands whilst the lamb began bleating’.

But there was, of course, a hitch. One point of his games machine was to raise money for the more portentous Analytical Engine, and Babbage soon discovered that though ‘every mamma and some few pappas who heard of it would doubtless take their children to so singular and interesting a sight’, and though he could try putting three shows on at once, nevertheless the mid-Victorian public simply weren’t interested any more. ‘The most profitable exhibition which had occurred for many years’, Babbage moaned, ‘was that of the little dwarf, General Tom Thumb’, Phineas Barnum’s famous midget money-spinner, displayed in 1844 before gawping London audiences at the self-same Adelaide Gallery where a decade earlier the Difference Engine models, steam guns and electromagnetic engines had drawn large audiences. According to London journalists the Adelaide ‘with its chemical lectures and electrical machines’ had by the later 1840s ‘changed its guise, and in lieu of philosophical experiments we have the gay quadrille and the bewildering polka’. So however apparently distinct, the fate of the automata shows and the calculating engines was remarkably similar, as metropolitan fashion switched away from the machines that could simulate human motions and emotions to the high life where the genteel tried these activities out for themselves.

Ultimately, Babbage’s Difference Engine suffered more or less the same end as a whole range of Victorian automata, ending its days as a museum piece….

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Photoresponsive Shape Morphing

Movement with light: Photoresponsive shape morphing of printed liquid crystal elastomers

Michael J. Ford1 ∙ Dominique H. Porcincula1 ∙ Rodrigo Telles3 ∙ … ∙ Shu Yang2 ∙ Elaine Lee1 lee1040@llnl.gov ∙ Caitlyn C. Cook1,5 krikorian3@llnl.gov … 

Progress and potential

Soft matter that can adapt in response to a stimulus like light holds immense promise for various applications, such as biomedical devices and soft robotics. One example of adaptive soft matter is liquid crystal elastomer composites, which incorporate a functional additive and change shape through a phase transition. The combination of the material composition, the printed geometry of the material, and the localization of the stimulus can enable novel movement and reaction to light, as we demonstrate in this paper. Our results mark a significant advancement toward creating complex, 3D-printed, intelligent materials that pave the way for developing next-generation adaptive machines and devices that can transform in response to specific stimuli.

Highlights

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Optimized inks for additive manufacturing of a liquid crystal elastomer composite

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Developed spatiotemporal control during printing for complex three-dimensional structures

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Demonstrated unique combinations of complex three-dimensional photoresponsive actuation

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Controlled novel modes of actuation with computer vision techniques

Summary

Soft machines will require soft materials that exhibit a rich diversity of functionality, including shape morphing and photoresponsivity. The combination of these functionalities enables useful behaviors in soft machines that can be further developed by synthesizing materials that exhibit localized responsivity.

Localized responsivity of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), which are soft materials that exhibit shape morphing, can be enabled by formulating composite inks for direct ink writing (DIW). Gold nanorods (AuNRs) can be added to LCEs to enable photothermal shape change upon absorption of light through a localized surface plasmon resonance.

We compared LCE formulations, focusing on their amenability for printing by DIW and the photoresponsivity of AuNRs. The local responsivity of different three-dimensional architectures enabled soft machines that could oscillate, crawl, roll, transport mass, and display other unique modes of actuation and motion in response to light, making these promising functional materials for advanced applications....

Soft machines could enable new breakthroughs in technologies related to human-machine interactions, remote exploration in difficult-to-reach spaces, and individually tailored health care. These machines will require soft materials that exhibit a diverse range of functionalities, including actuation for movement, conductivity for sensing and signal processing, stimuli-responsivity, self-healing, and reprocessability.1,2,3The demonstration of such a diverse range of functionalities results in a profound outcome where “the material is the machine.”4,5 That is, by taking advantage of behaviors like self-assembly and phase transitions, these materials as machines can replace traditional sensors, transducers, gears, levers, and electromagnetic motors to enable perception, responsivity, and motion without engineered complexity.2,4

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) that are pre-programmed to change shape in response to external stimuli are considered useful for soft machines.6,7 The shape morphing is induced by heat, electricity, and light.8,9Light may be useful to stimulate localized actuation and does not require physical contact with the shape-changing material, as wires that transmit electrical power might require.10,11 Localized actuation using light could also allow for unique modes of actuation.12 For example, asymmetric illumination of photoresponsive LCEs led to twisting and rolling motions.13 Peristaltic motion that resembles the movement of biological organisms has been demonstrated by using localized impingement of different patterns of light upon an LCE.14 To extend this work, the programmed order of the liquid crystal (LC) domains could be controlled and modified....

[softrobotcritics]

Knitogami

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Dion, drawing from her experience as a textile researcher and garment designer, views this work as a crucial convergence of scientific theory and practical design applications. "Right now, fabric design relies on experience, experimentation, and intuition," she says. "If we can apply predictive models to textiles, we open the door to fabrics with precise, engineered properties -- whether it's self-folding medical materials, reconfigurable structures for soft robotics, or garments that adapt to the body in new ways."

Decoding knitting, one stitch at a time

To build their model, Niu borrowed mathematical techniques from an unexpected source: general relativity, the theory used to describe the warping of space and time. While relativity explains how gravity bends space-time, the researchers applied similar geometric principles to explain how the looping paths of yarn create curvature in knitted fabrics.

Niu explains that knitting, at its core, is a method of transforming a one-dimensional strand of yarn into a structured, flexible two-dimensional sheet, which can then fold itself into complex three-dimensional shapes. The researchers realized that this transformation could be described mathematically using the same principles that govern how surfaces curve in space.

Instead of seeing a knitted fabric as just a collection of interlocking loops, the team treated it as a continuous surface with an intrinsic curvature determined by the arrangement of stitches. By applying the formalism used to describe how materials bend and stretch -- known as elasticity theory -- they built an energetic model that simulates the forces acting on the loops of yarn and predicts how a piece of fabric will deform in space.

"The key insight was recognizing that knitting operates like a programmable material," Kamien says. "By controlling the stitch pattern -- just knits and purls -- you can essentially encode instructions for how the fabric will behave once it comes off the needles. That's why a scarf, a sock, and a sweater can all come from the same kind of yarn but behave so differently."

Their simulations revealed that the mechanical properties of knitted fabrics often depend more on stitch geometry than on the material itself. Whether the yarn was wool, cotton, or synthetic, the fabric's tendency to curl, pleat, or expand followed universal geometric rules. This suggests that knitting is governed by fundamental mathematical principles -- ones that could be harnessed to design materials with precise, tunable behaviors.

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Dion coined a new term for this approach: knitogami™ -- a fusion of knitting and origami that captures the idea of self-folding textiles. "We call it knitogami because it extends the principles of origami into a soft, fabric-based medium," she explains. "Instead of relying on folds and creases in paper, we're using the inherent elasticity and structure of knitted loops to create dynamic, shape-shifting materials."

By mapping out these rules, the team developed a framework that could be used to create programmable textiles -- fabrics that shape themselves without requiring external forces like heat or manual pleating.

"If we can predict how a piece of fabric will shape itself just by changing the stitch pattern, we can start designing textiles with built-in functionality," Dion says. "This could lead to garments that adapt to movement, medical textiles that mold to the body, or even large-scale deployable structures that assemble themselves."...

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Festo publicity concept-device borders on kinetic art.