TY - GEN
T1 - Beautiful flexible microactuator changing its structural color with variable pitch grating
AU - Suzumori, Koichi
AU - Mihara, Masaki
AU - Wakimoto, Shuichi
PY - 2011/12/1
Y1 - 2011/12/1
N2 - Our research group has investigated various kinds of soft mechanisms for many years. Through these researches, several soft rubber actuators driven pneumatically have been developed. The typical one is FMA (Flexible Microactuator), which realizes continuous bending motions like a human finger. In addition, we are recently interested in several novel functions appeared on soft mechanism surfaces such as repellency, hydrophily, friction, structural color, and adhesiveness, which are realized with micro scale soft structures fabricated on the surfaces. We believe novel additional functions can be realized by utilizing the deformability of the soft structures. In this paper, micro grating structures made from silicone rubber are reported. Because of its elastic property, it can realize changing structural color. The experimental results show that beautiful color change can be observed. We fabricate a soft micro grating structure on FMA and confirm the appearance of structural color, which changes in following FMA's motion. This color change indicates distributed information of the strain of FMA, which may be used for servo control of FMA in the future.
AB - Our research group has investigated various kinds of soft mechanisms for many years. Through these researches, several soft rubber actuators driven pneumatically have been developed. The typical one is FMA (Flexible Microactuator), which realizes continuous bending motions like a human finger. In addition, we are recently interested in several novel functions appeared on soft mechanism surfaces such as repellency, hydrophily, friction, structural color, and adhesiveness, which are realized with micro scale soft structures fabricated on the surfaces. We believe novel additional functions can be realized by utilizing the deformability of the soft structures. In this paper, micro grating structures made from silicone rubber are reported. Because of its elastic property, it can realize changing structural color. The experimental results show that beautiful color change can be observed. We fabricate a soft micro grating structure on FMA and confirm the appearance of structural color, which changes in following FMA's motion. This color change indicates distributed information of the strain of FMA, which may be used for servo control of FMA in the future.
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U2 - 10.1109/ICRA.2011.5979945
DO - 10.1109/ICRA.2011.5979945
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84866896105
SN - 9781612843865
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
SP - 2771
EP - 2776
BT - 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2011
T2 - 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2011
Y2 - 9 May 2011 through 13 May 2011
ER -