Wood-Based Hygromorphic Robots Mastered in Ten Minutes, Fostering Ideation Through Tangible Coding

Abstract

Designing physically intelligent soft robots is more than actuator fabrication; shaping a responsive material for autonomous task execution, i.e., in materia programming, needs a broad skill set, including a good command of crafts. “Thinking with hands” during manual material shaping is often performed unconsciously in a pre-prototyping phase without deserved attention. Yet, such ideation can be enabling in creating a starting point for successive optimization and modeling. We suggest a workshop, aimed at the highest accessibility, on physical intelligence and in materia coding. The workshop specifically focuses on rapid ideation of robot embodiments, with minimal burden of fabrication complexity and even need for specific skills such as programming languages. The employed technique of layering wood veneer as the active material and waterproof tape as the passive material into bioinspired bilayer actuators can be mastered even by preschoolers in ten minutes, giving vast opportunities to code intelligent behavior and accomplish situated tasks via intuitive manual shaping (cutting and combining) the material. Wood, as the central material in the workshop, creates immediate personal engagement with participants and fosters creativity. Bilayer-based embodiments showcase material intelligence via morphological changes in response to humidity and give immediate, visual, and tactile feedback. When situated in an environment and exposed to humidity, the bilayer-based robot starts the execution of a task defined by the encoded shape of its layers and layer arrangement, exemplifying physical intelligence. The wood bilayer robotics workshop has been tested more than five times, confirming accessibility to a broad demographic. Contextualizing apparently simple crafting steps fosters not only public outreach but also encourages explorations in the morphological space for enriched robot embodiments.