muscle wire

[Killerwolfbot]

Hey everybody I've been looking into muscle wire lately. Its cool stuff but seems kinda useless. Has anyone use it before? What kind of use did you get out of it?

[SeagullOne]

To be honest, I haven't used it --yet--

But what I'm interested in using it for are things like subtle face movements or other skin or tiny muscle features for an animatronic project. I'm an animation major, but, of course, I also build robots. I thought, why not put the two together and build animatronics?

I've thought to doing an animatronic alien or dinosaur or something for Halloween so once I get the time, I think I'll be putting some muscle wire to use in that respect. A good friend of mine who goes to the Art school I attend actually creates professional puppets, so I'm anxious to query his method for puppet making. Then see if I can automate it.

[richiereynolds]

I've seen it used in art pieces e.g. to automate a small metal bird's (very light) wings to flap slowly when a sensor detects someone close to the exhibit. It's so delicate though, hard to think of it being mych use for anything very pracical.

[mstacho]

I actually used it in a more professional context -- we were working on a way to keep tension on a membrane made of kapton without any traditional "moving parts".  To put it bluntly...it's terrible for precision purposes like that :-P  It has crazy problems with hysteresis (where the way it changes shape depends on if it's contracting or expanding) and a pretty irritating temperature dependence.

That being said, it actually worked! It just didn't do anything particularly well, and it was hard to repeat the experiments unless we used a crazy advanced control system.  It's one of those technologies I chalk up to being in the cool but not yet ready category.

MIKE