According to foreign media reports, the magical materials created by a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may allow the furniture to assemble itself.
In the eyes of many people, Skylar Tibbits's work at the MIT self-assembly lab looks like a pile of waste. But for the wood and fabric in the eyes of others, Tibits sees robots, many, many robots.
They don't have a microprocessor, and they don't have a bright titanium skeleton. But the wood and carbon fiber made by the team of Tibitz can be said to combine sensor, logic and output technology, and is expected to change everything from airplanes to clothes to paperback furniture.
Self-assembly labs, as the name suggests, focus on making things self-assemblable. For example, it develops a series of small wooden boards that become elephant toys when exposed to moisture. Tibitz and two collaborators, Christophe Guberan and Erik Demaine, are studying clothes that can be deformed in response to weather changes. In the future, the research results of the laboratory may permit the IKEA furniture to be assembled by touching the water (energy source) without the use of a universal wrench.
Tibitz collectively referred to these changes as "4D printing." It's similar to 3D printing, but with one more dimension: time (Tibits likes to call it "vigor"). In his view, the programming of various materials in the future will become feasible.
The tools used by Tibitz and his team are not particularly novel. Taking the carbon fiber project as an example, the manufacturing process is completely two-dimensional. The team started with a standard carbon fiber roll and instantly printed another material on the mesh using a computer numerical control device. This material, prepared in the laboratory of Tibitz, responds to changes in the weather. As the carbon fiber heats up, the temperature-sensitive material deforms, causing the fiber to deform in the manner set by the designer.
MIT invents magical materials: or allows furniture to assemble itself
A team is trying to use this technology to make smarter racing tails. When the driver turns, the heat generated by the friction triggers the deformation of the heat-sensitive material in the carbon fiber. As a result, the empennage is deformed to optimize the aerodynamics and achieve faster speeds. In addition, the same carbon fiber can also be used to improve the efficiency of jet engines and reduce carbon emissions.
Those 3D printed wood projects use traditional fused deposition printers (such as MakerBot) and specially formulated plastic filaments filled with powdered wood fibers. By setting the "wood grain" pattern during the printing process, the designer can control the curling of the water when it is wet.
The focus of Tibitz's research is not on the use of high-end equipment, but on leveraging the intelligence of his team to look at materials in new ways. Its team includes researchers Carrie McKnelly, Christopher Martin and Filipe Camposare. Each creation is a combination of unrelated materials into a practical and cohesive new whole. “We are used to making materials available to us, but there are still many processes in the material properties,†says Dibitz.
When do you have self-assembled furniture?
In the early days of the lab, Tibitz struggled to find the right tools to achieve his vision. Low-end 3D printers don't print large items, so his lab specializes in developing software to print 50-foot long chains in a 5-inch box. Now, they face another barrier to universality—improving engineers' awareness of these magical materials and convincing them to try.
To make those materials widely available, improvements are needed as well as regulatory approval. But Tibitz believes that the most important thing is to make engineers change their perception of programmability.
"I think the biggest obstacle to popularization is that people are very outdated about robots," he said. Despite this, the designer successfully convinced some visionary companies to experiment with his materials and fund their research and development, including Carbitex, Autodesk, Airbus and Briggs Automotive Company.
“We can listen to materials and use them as programmable materials. We can program creatures.†He said, “Calculation is no longer just on the computer, and computing is everywhere.â€
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