Tuesday, June 29, 2010

 

Programmable Matter?

I am curious as to the flexibility this material may have in achieving various shapes. from the paper, we can see that it is possible to program a given sheet to fold into a small set of final shapes. But what constraints are there on such subset of shapes? It would also be nice to think about evolving the constraints on the sheets; the current (impressive) work leads to a set of pre-defined shapes, but can we let them evolve into unexpected shapes?

"Programmable sheet puckers up spontaneously into an aeroplane or a boat." News report @ Nature News, full paper @ PNAS.


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