Walking aids are critical for people with mobility impairments, yet current options remain unsatisfactory. Static knee braces are lightweight and affordable, but their rigid joints force users into unnatural gait patterns, leading to fatigue, reduced safety, and high abandonment rates. Robotic exoskeletons, in contrast, offer dynamic assistance that adapts to gait phases but rely on sensors, motors, and batteries that make them heavy, complex, and prohibitively expensive.

Complex actuators in a small form factor are essential for dynamic interfaces. In this paper, we propose ConeAct, a cone-shaped actuator that can extend, contract, and bend in multiple directions to support rich expression in dynamic materials. A key benefit of our actuator is that it is self-contained and portable as the whole system. We designed our actuator’s structure to be multistable to hold its shape passively, while we control its transition between states using active materials, i.e., shape memory alloys. We present the design space by showcasing our actuator module as part of self-rolling robots, reconfigurable deployable structures, volumetric shape-changing objects and tactile displays. To assist users in designing such structures, we present an interactive editor including simulation to design such interactive capabilities.

Haptic feedback is important for immersive, assistive, or multimodal interfaces, but engineering devices that generalize across applications is notoriously difficult. To address the issue of versatility, we propose Parametric Haptics, geometry-based tactile feedback devices that are customizable to render a variety of tactile sensations. To achieve this, we integrate the actuation mechanism with the tactor geometry into passive 3D printable patches, which are then connected to a generic wearable actuation interface consisting of micro gear motors. The key benefit of our approach is that the 3D-printed patches are modular, can consist of varying numbers and shapes of tactors, and that the tactors can be grouped and moved by our actuation geometry over large areas of the skin. The patches are soft, thin, conformable, and easy to customize to different use cases, thus potentially enabling a large design space of diverse tactile sensations.

From transoceanic bridges to large-scale installations, truss structures have been known for their structural stability and shape complexity. In addition to the advantages of static trusses, truss structures have a large degree of freedom to change shape when equipped with rotatable joints and retractable beams. However, it is difficult to design a complex motion and build a control system for large numbers of trusses. In this paper, we present PneuMesh, a novel truss-based shape-changing system that is easy to design and build but still able to achieve a range of tasks. PneuMesh accomplishes this by introducing an air channel connection strategy and reconfigurable constraint design that drastically decreases the number of control units without losing the complexity of shape-changing. We develop a design tool with real-time simulation to assist users in designing the shape and motion of truss-based shape-changing robots and devices. A design session with seven participants demonstrates that PneuMesh empowers users to design and build truss structures with a wide range of shapes and various functional motions.

A VCO-based(Voltage Controlled Oscillator) temperature sensor with multi-threshold MOSFET based sensing element is proposed. The proposed temperature sensor converts temperature variation into frequency and then into digital readings. In the proposed temperature sensor, the ratio of two reference currents, generated by P-MOSFETs operated in sub-threshold region and with different channel doping concentration, is used to sense the variation of temperature and achieves a 3σ inaccuracy of ±0.06°C after first-order poly-fit with systematic nonlinearity removal. The ratio of currents is then transformed into difference of the output frequencies of two identical CMOS-thyristor based VCOs, both of which are optimized to alleviate the impact of charge sharing and charge injection on the precision of the temperature sensor. In this way, there is no need for generating an external reference clock. The prototype is fabricated in a 130nm CMOS process and achieves an inaccuracy of +0.44°C/-0.4°C. The proposed sensor achieves a resolution of 0.1°C and a resolution FoM of 0.12nJ·K2. The prototype occupies an area of 0.07mm2.

Computer-supported digital-physical tutorial systems have been widely used in the field of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) education for their advances in conveying multimodal contents. However, there is limited work in comparing strengths and weaknesses of the teaching effects between the human teachers and the non-human tutorial systems in ICH education. In this paper, we designed an introductory course and presented BatikGuide, a tangible tutorial system that provides multimodal instructions on Batik art and real-time evaluations. Followed by, we conducted a comparative experiment and analyzed the data collected from the quantitative scales, observation, and semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that there is no obvious disparity between BatikGuide and the human teacher. Although the human teacher could have better performance in professional instructions, BatikGuide remains the potential in stimulating learning motivation, large-scale replication, and public dissemination. According to these findings, we discussed the prospects of computer-based systems in ICH education and preservation.

Co-creative systems have been widely explored in the field of computational creativity. However, existing AI partners of these systems are mostly virtual agents. As sketching on paper with embodied robots could be more engaging for designers' early-stage ideation and collaborative practices, we envision the possibility of Cobbie, a mobile robot that ideates iteratively with designers by generating creative and diverse sketches. To evaluate the differences in co-creativity and user experience between the co-creative robots and virtual agents, we conducted a comparative experiment and analyzed the data collected from quantitative scales, observation, and semi-structured interview. The results reveal that Cobbie is more satisfying in motivating exploration, provoking unexpected ideas and engaging designers in the collaborative ideation process. Based on these findings, we discussed the prospects of co-creative robots for future developments of human-AI collaborative systems.