Скачать или смотреть 🎧 Metamaterials

From uses in new, higher-performing optical, electronic, and acoustic devices to improved antennas and stealth aircraft applications, metamaterials are a special class of engineered materials designed to have properties not typically found in nature. We’ll explore a new metamaterial robot that could have industry use for temperature regulation or physical information encryption in the U.S. National Science Foundation’s “Discovery Files”.

“Magnetic activation is a non-contact system. And then it makes the metamaterial or the robot extremely elegant, very light with unique properties.”

Glaucio Paulino is a professor at Princeton University whose NSF-supported lab has taken inspiration from the folding art of origami to create a new type of metamaterial robot that can expand, assume new shapes, move and follow electromagnetic commands without physically touching the metamaterial.

Potential uses for the metamaterial robot include scaling panels to be used as temperature regulation or encrypting information in a physical, hacker proof system.

Future development includes combing origami forms with the tension and compression based structural principle of tensegrity for unique, high-resilience and high-strength applications.

“This is a work in progress, but if the ideas that we have work, this will offer a new paradigm in structural and material design.”