Motivation
Shape is an important and tangible element in our visual and haptic communication
Importance for human to understand and interpret complex information
Areas of engineering, art, sciences, medicine, entertainment etc.
2-D to 3-D technology
What alternative input to current human-machine interface?
Digital Clay is an array of fluidic driven actuators for display of shape and haptic feedback. The
importance of shape in almost all aspect of life serves as the motivation for this next generation
human-machine interface. The user can command the device to display any surface in 2.5-D and
shape/ edit the surface.
The greatest challenge is to be able to simulate material behavior and properties with the Digital
Clay. This system was realized by Dr. Haihong Zhu, CTO Sentrinsic LLC,
(http://www.sentrinsic.com/) while working as a PhD student under Dr. Wayne Book in the
Intelligent Machine Dynamics Laboratory (IMDL) of Georgia Institute of Technology. The
current testbed is a 5x5 array of fluidic actuated pins. The sub-systems on this test-bed consists
of:
Micro-miniature On-Off valves
Actuator embedded displacement sensors
Hydraulic Matrix drive system
Hardware Implementation
RT Linux host computer