Soft, modular, shape-changing displays with hyperelastic bubble arrays

Incorporating compliance into shape-changing display s can improve their wearability and actuation modalities. While recent advances in soft actuators highlight promising paths for soft shape-changing displays, these displa ys currently face some practical challenges of device failure and limited actuator displacement. A monolithic fabrication processes means the device is challenging to repair, for a single point of failure often renders the whole device ineffective. We have leveraged a modular hyperelasti c bubble array layer to create a soft shape-changing skin. The modularity of this device allows for rapid repair of individual bubbles and fast prototyping, and the spherical, hyperelastic actuators enable an increase in degrees of freedom due to bubble-to- bubble interactions. Furthermore, we present a forward kinematic description of our device, incorporating these bubble- to-bubble interactions and the nonlinear instabilities unique to hyperelastic actuator inflation. We demonstrate the utilit y of thi s soft shape- changing skin as a haptic display that can be worn comfortably or applied to passive interactive objects such as a computer mouse.