UCLA Engineering / April 2019
Today, most of the devices we use are, literally, stiff. Your e-reader likely can’t fold in half to slip into a pocket. Rock solid airplane wings don’t morph in shape mid-flight to adjust to gusts of wind. Your cell phone screen isn’t self-healing. And robots don’t give soft gentle hugs. If an object bends, that’s most likely because it has a physical joint (although several companies have bendable phones in the works). If an object changes shape, a large amount of mechanical force has been applied to make it do so. And when it physically breaks—well, you likely need a new one.
In the future, all these assumptions might go out the window. Materials scientists and mechanical engineers at UCLA are designing novel types of materials and devices that can bend and flex and interact with the world in entirely new ways. For now, most of their work is in the early stages; prototypes and models and materials that only exist in tiny quantities. But these researchers have grand visions, and what they see is a future composed of devices and robots that adapt to their surroundings with more unprecedented capabilities… Read more at UCLA.edu.