Waving tentacles 8×8: controlling a SMA actuator by optical flow

Abstract

When we see the wriggling movement and the shape of a tentacle like the sea anemone under the sea, we feel an existence of a primitive life. The goal of this research is to realize the expression of a kinetic artwork or interactive artwork such as waving tentacles of sea anemones. At present, soft actuators that bend in multiple directions have been developed. However, these each have a complex structure or are expensive. To realize the expression of waving tentacles we need a large number of actuators. Therefore, we developed a budget actuator with a simple structure. Previously, we have introduced three motion patterns for controlling a SMA actuator that can bend in three directions and an experimental system with 9 actuators [Nakayasu 2014]. In this paper, we introduce an experimental system with 64 actuators that react to a hand's movement via an optical flow algorithm.