EXPRESSIVE MECHANISMS
Soft robots that move
without wires, driven
only by magnetic fields.
Magnetic shape-programmable materials are made by mixing ferrous powder into a soft matrix. Until now they were mostly made at microscale, which limited them to surgical robotics.
I took them out of the lab and into the hand. I developed a fabrication method for thicker magnetically programmed silicone structures, and a chainmail structure that is the first above microscale.
Inventing the process before the product
No one makes this material at this scale, so I had to work out how. After many iterations, multilayer acrylic moulds proved best for casting thick structures. For thin sheets, I engraved a pattern into acrylic and scraped the ferrous silicone into it.
Same instinct as my pens: when the tool doesn’t exist, build the tool.
One tesla, and the material remembers
By controlling the orientation of the magnetic field inside each structure, I could decide how it deforms. The orientation is set with an impulse magnetiser at one tesla. Then a magnet in your hand makes it fold, curl or arch.
Best Demo, and a research collaboration
I exhibited at Dutch Design Week 2024 with Design United (4TU), and won Best Demo at the Dutch Soft Robotics Symposium. The work then became a research project on the expressive qualities of soft robots, user-tested with TU Delft, the University of Twente and Utrecht University.
