Explosion-powered eversible tactile displays

Abstract

High-resolution electronic tactile displays stand to transform haptics for remote machine operation, virtual reality, and digital information access for people who are blind or visually impaired. Yet, increasing the resolution of these displays requires increasing the number of individually addressable actuators while simultaneously reducing their total surface area, power consumption, and weight, challenges most evidently reflected in the dearth of affordable multiline braille displays. Blending principles from soft robotics, microfluidics, and nonlinear mechanics, we introduce a 10-dot–by–10-dot array of 2-millimeter-diameter, combustion-powered, eversible soft actuators that individually rise in 0.24 milliseconds to repeatably produce display patterns. Our rubber architecture is hermetically sealed and demonstrates resistance to liquid and dirt ingress. We demonstrate complete actuation cycles in an untethered tactile display prototype. Our platform technology extends the capabilities of tactile displays to environments that are inaccessible to traditional actuation modalities.