Author: lwalko@andrew.cmu.edu

This week we tested our first version of our silicon anemone and we made progress on programming and circuiting the electronics. We originally planned to print our newest version of the mold, but since the 3D printers were down, we had to postpone our plans. Monday, 3.20: Tuesday, 3.21: Wednesday, 3.22: Sunday, 3.26:

Our proof of concept has gone through some revisions – we’ve simplified the design to be two chamber. With only a two chamber design, we can still accomplish our goal while making less work for us. In addition, we’ve faced some difficulties figuring out how to design a cylindrical mold, so the proof of concept
Continue reading Proof of Concept – Leah and Elise

By Leah Walko The inspiration for this mold was some sort of twig or leaf-like thing. The goal was to make it long and straight as a test run before making the official mold design for our project – which is inspired by a sea anemone. As it’s my first mold, I went very simple
Continue reading Mold Design Workshop Part A

Silent Evolution by Jason deCaires Taylor https://urth.co/magazine/the-underwater-art-installations-preserving-our-marine-life Expression and Intention The artist is seeking to use underwater art installations to double as artificial reefs. The sculptures submerged in the ocean all seem to have a common theme that echoes back to the lives of humans. They portray events such as the financial crash of 2008,
Continue reading Infusing Art with Technology by Leah Walko

Breathing Wall Polen Budak, E., Zirhli, O., Stokes, A. A., & Akbulut, O. (2016). The Breathing Wall (Brall)–Triggering Life (In) Animate Surfaces. Leonardo, 49(2), 162–163. https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_01199 The “breathing wall” is a structure that can respond in an organic matter to touch and stimulus. The idea of an “organic” city seems interesting to me. It doesn’t seem very
Continue reading Art and Design Inspirations by Leah Walko

J. -Y. Lee and K. -J. Cho, “Development of magnet connection of modular units for soft robotics,” 2017 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots and Ambient Intelligence (URAI), Jeju, Korea (South), 2017, pp. 65-67, doi: 10.1109/URAI.2017.7992886.

I started with an article called “A Multimodal Soft Crawling-Climbing Robot with the Controllable Horizontal Plane to Slope Transition” that was first written in 2019. The authors of the paper, Y. Zhang, L. Ge, J. Zhou, H. Xu and G. Gu created an inchworm-inspired soft robot that can climb planes up to a 75 degree
Continue reading Lateral Literature Search by Leah Walko