When we see the wriggling movement and the shape of a tentacle like the sea anemone under the sea, we feel an existence of a primitive life. The goal of this research is to realize the expression of a kinetic artwork or interactive artwork like waving tentacles of sea anemones by robotics. At present, soft actuators bending in multi directions is developed in several areas. However, these have a complex structure or are expensive. To realize the expression of waving tentacles needs a large number of actuators. Therefore, we developed a budget actuator with a simple structure. Previously, we have introduced three motion patterns for controlling a SMA actuator that can bend in three directions and an experimental system with 9 actuators. In this project, we introduce an experimental system with 64 actuators that react to a hand’s movement by an optical flow algorithm.
Publications
Nakayasu, A. 2015. Waving Tentacles 8×8: Controlling a SMA Actuator by Optical Flow. In SIGGRAPH ASIA 2015 Posters, ACM.
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research(C) 26330418.