Chloe Choi, Sean and, I visited Michaels the art and craft store. This blog post is written with Chloe. Here is a link to her blog.
Below are some of the soft items that have a potential for exploration.
Chloe liked these a lot. Since they are strings they can be used as cable extensions or an extension for it.
We are not completely sure how we can use these materials but with how expressive they can be with colors, materials, and even the feel, Chloe believes slime and jelly can be excellent candidates for soft robotics exploration. A possible idea would be using vibrations to move these materials. Another theory is to control the temperature. This was my favourite find at the store.
A colorful and common material that can definitely be used in cable control. Yarns come in a variety of thicknesses and visual properties that can affect how they may control a certain mechanism. It is also interesting to explore knitting as a form of soft robotics.
Both of us believe leather is an interesting material. Perhaps the limited stretchiness of the material, can allow for unique cable control. While leather isn’t too stretchy at first, it will stretch over time under constant pressure. Another idea would be to utilize its texture as it has some traction, while not as much as rubber. It also comes in beautiful colours.
We found a variety of chords with varying stretchiness. The first picture shows rubber bands, the stretchiest of them all. The second are called loopers which have some sort of stretchiness but not a lot. The third are chords which are not stretchy at all.
