Robert Lang Lecture

Gustavus Adolphus College hosted a night with Robert Lang as part of their Rydell Professorship program. It was at the Science Museum of Minnesota where he gave us his standard lecture: From Flapping Birds to Space Telescopes. I've seen it once before, but it was nice to hear it again.

Origami Minnesota also had a presence at the event. We have a neat new flyer, which has been printed on origami sheets!

I think it was a pretty great idea. We also taught some people how to fold cranes for the Cranestorm project, which has reached 70,000+ cranes! They still need almost 30,000 more.

If you want to see Lang's lecture for yourself, it's best to try and catch one of his live lectures, but there is a little bit online. Unfortunately, neither of the following links covers the total content of the lecture. :(

=>The IMA lecture is cut short, because they did not get permission to post all of the lecture. 

Partial IMA lecture

=>The TED lecture is short because TED limits their speakers to 18 minutes on stage, while Lang's lecture can fill up an hour, easy. 

Abbreviated TED lecture

Still, I hope you enjoy it!

Programmable Matter by Folding

I read through the article on self-folding origami and found it to be pretty neat!

They designed a square sheet with 32 rigid tiles that are connected by 20 actuators/hinges to form a crease pattern. Actually, the pattern is the basic windmill base that was so important in the European side of  paper folding! This pattern can make boats, planes, windmills, the Pajarita, horses, fish and such. 

Windmill Base Crease Pattern

They used nitinol which is a metal that can be programmed, via an annealing (heating) process, to a specified shape. For example, if I bent it into a tube and clamped it so that it could not unbend, then annealed it, the tube shape would be locked into the nitinol's memory. When cool, the nitinol can be bend into a different shape, like a cup, but if it were to be heated up again, the nitinol would take on the memory shape, which in the example is a tube.

So anyway, the nitinol was given a memory shape of the hinge being closed, then it was bend open. Once the hinges are heated up, they will close, forcing the sheet to fold. The way they heated up the hinges is to run electricity through them, allowing the resistance of the nitinol to create the heat. This means that they could use electricity to close the creases, but would have to unfold them by hand.

If you want to know more about it, I suggest you read the article!

Self-folding Paper!

A video, made by the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, was brought to my attention. It shows a sheet of circuitry that has pre-made creases/hinges build into it and magnets so that once a fold has been made, it will stay in place. The sheet seems to be designed to take advantage of the windmill base that became so popular in Europe. The base is highly versatile, used to make animals, vehicles and toys including the famous Pajarita. You can read more at Make: Online and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) site.This particular sheet is programed to fold into a boat and an airplane, which shows that programed digi-gami is a real possibility in the future. 

I have a copy of the article and it is very exciting! It refers to an earlier paper where they discovered a universal crease pattern. I must admit I am in a bit over my head at the moment, so I will leave this post as an introduction to the idea and then write a few posts later when it all makes more sense to me!

The video, for your consideration:

I downloaded the video from the PNAS website.

I do not believe there is any audio, so if you don't hear anything, you're not necessarily deaf.