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Input, Output and Construction Methods for Custom Fabrication of Room-Scale Deployable Pneumatic Structures

Published: 21 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the future of designing room-scale deployable pneumatic structures that can be fabricated with interactive capabilities and thus be responsive to human input and environments. While there have been recent advances in fabrication methods for creating large-scale structures, they have mainly focused around creating passive structures. Hence in this work, we collectively tackle three main challenges that need to be solved for designing room-scale interactive deployable structures namely -- the input, output (actuation) and construction methods. First, we explore three types of sensing methods --- acoustic, capacitive and pressure --- in order to embed input into these structures. These sensing methods enable users to perform gestures such as knock, squeeze and swipe with specific parts of our fabricated structure such as doors, windows, etc. and make them interactive. Second, we explore three types of actuation mechanisms -- inflatable tendon drive, twisted tendon drive and roll bending actuator -- that are implemented at structural scale and can be embedded into our structures to enable a variety of responsive actuation. Finally, we provide a construction method to custom fabricate and assemble inter-connected pneumatic trusses with embedded sensing and actuation capability to prototype interactions with room-scale deployable structures. To further illustrate the collective (input, output and construction) usage of the system, we fabricated three exemplar interactive deployable structures -- a responsive canopy, an interactive geodesic dome and a portable table (Figures 1 and 2). These can be deployed from a compact deflated state to a much larger inflated state which takes on a desired form while offering interactivity.

Supplementary Material

swaminathan (swaminathan.zip)
Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, Input, Output and Construction Methods for Custom Fabrication of Room-Scale Deployable Pneumatic Structures

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    cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
    Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 3, Issue 2
    June 2019
    802 pages
    EISSN:2474-9567
    DOI:10.1145/3341982
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 21 June 2019
    Accepted: 01 April 2019
    Revised: 01 February 2019
    Received: 01 November 2018
    Published in IMWUT Volume 3, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. deployable pneumatic structures
    2. digital fabrication
    3. embedded interactivity

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