W7

I first created this pillow-like inflatable which looks almost the same as the one mentioned in the paper. At first, I find it super hard to cut the baking paper using the trimmer. So it took me some time to figure out how to glue it to the board so that the surface of the baking paper is flat enough to do the cutting. And it’s not an easy task to iron the TPU material with baking paper. It takes practice to figure out the right timing and strength so that it won’t be too hot to melt the TPU nor too cold not to be able to seal the gap. It’s cool that the air won’t flow into the position where one TPU is directly touching another and this will push the inflatable to expand in a magic way.

The following two are created by my teammates.

After spending some time figuring out the parameters of Adobe illustrator, I figure out how to laser-cut the baking paper. With the help of another machine that is able to press the TPU paper with a preset temperature and time, I can seal one inflatable much more efficiently compared with in-person ironing.

I think the most interesting thing about using a motor pump to drive the air to push the movement compared with solely using motors as a power source is that it will produce a more natural and fluent moving pattern. For instance, if I want to complete a simple movement of letting an object move from position A to B, if I use the motor,  from a coding perspective, I will have to use deltatime to smooth this process out otherwise it will look stiff. But if we use the pump instead, the flow of air will be much more natural and people can also identify whether it’s in the middle of the process by looking at whether the hollow place bulges up or not. Personally speaking, I think it will be interesting to implement soft robotics components of air pumping as the skin of the tail, which will amplify the movement scope and the message conveyed. I think the most important takeaway from this class is that sometimes instead of using mechanical structures, it will be much better to use some natural power to drive the movement of the clothes, which will result in much more natural and harmonious interaction.