Tingyu Cheng

• Georgia Institute of Technology

For today's electronics manufacturing process, the emphasis on stable functionality, durability, and fixed physical forms is designed to ensure long-term usability. However, this focus on robustness and permanence complicates the disassembly and recycling processes, leading to significant environmental repercussions. In this paper, we present three...

While aging adults frequently prefer to "age in place", their children can worry about their well-being, especially when they live at a distance. Many in-home systems are designed to monitor the real-time status of seniors at home and provide information to their adult children. However, we observed that the needs and concerns of both sides in the...

Energy harvesting reduces the burden of power source maintenance and promises to make computing systems genuinely ubiquitous. Researchers have made inroads in this area, but their novel energy harvesting materials and fabrication techniques remain inaccessible to the general maker communities. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a toolkit that ma...

Conventional vision-based systems, such as cameras, have demonstrated their enormous versatility in sensing human activities and developing interactive environments. However, these systems have long been criticized for incurring privacy, power, and latency issues due to their underlying structure of pixel-wise analog signal acquisition, computation...

The frequent consumption and discarding of clothing are unsustainable. Some minimalist practices in fashion can reduce fashion waste and the cost of carbon, one of them is the practice of capsule wardrobes. To support the sustainable practice of capsule wardrobe, we designed Minnie, the Musical Clothes Hanger —Minnie for short. Minnie is designed t...

This paper presents a state-of-the-art 3D printed dielectric reflectarray antenna featuring one-shot deployability and wide-angle beam-scanning ability. The design is enabled by a series of “kirigami”-inspired two-stage snapping-like element structure that can be retracted by 66% to save space. The prototype is fabricated with stereolithography 3D...

A major cost, inconvenience, and source of failure for adding sensors and electronic accessories to automobiles is wiring the systems into the car’s power supply. We propose an alternative approach, computer-proximal energy harvesting, which harvests power locally, so wiring is not needed. In this article, we provide an overview of the principles a...

Human environments are filled with large open spaces that are separated by structures like walls, facades, glass windows, etc. Most often, these structures are largely passive offering little to no interactivity. In this paper, we present Duco, a large-scale electronics fabrication robot that enables room-scale & building-scale circuitry to add int...

We propose Silver Tape, a simple yet novel fabrication technique to transfer inkjet-printed silver traces from paper onto versatile substrates, without time-/space- consuming processes such as screen printing or heat sintering. This allows users to quickly implement silver traces with a variety of properties by exploiting a wide range of substrates...

Inspired by natural creatures, soft robots possess the unique advantages of large actuation and excellent adaptability. Untethered designs of soft robots are drawing more attention to researchers, but current research is limited. Also, there is an increasing need to improve the performance of bio-mimetic robots. This work describes an untethered so...

We develop a novel method printing complex self-folding geometries. We demonstrated that with a desktop fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer, off-the-shelf printing filaments and a design editor, we can print flat thermoplastic composites and trigger them to self-fold into 3D with arbitrary bending angles. This is a suitable technique, called...

We present a printed paper actuator as a low cost, reversible and electrical actuation and sensing method. This is a novel but easily accessible enabling technology that expands upon the library of actuation-sensing materials in HCI. By integrating three physical phenomena, including the bilayer bending actuation, the shape memory effect of the the...

In this video, we showcased "Printed Paper Actuator", a low cost, reversible and electrical actuation and sensing method. We developed the actuator by printing a single layer conductive Polylactide (PLA) on a piece of copy paper via a desktop fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer, which seems simple but indeed realizes electronic control: touc...

We demonstrate "Thermorph", a rapid prototyping system aims to print flat thermoplastic composites and trigger them to self-fold into 3D with arbitrary bending angles. An interactive web-based design platform is developed to allow users to input their desired 3D shape or design 2D pattern, and see the printer printing it out automatically. Thermorp...

We demonstrate Printed Paper Actuator as a low cost, reversible and electrical actuation and sensing method. This is a novel but easily accessible enabling technology that expands upon the library of actuation-sensing materials in HCI. By integrating three physical phenomena, including the bilayer bending actuation, the shape memory effect of the t...

Developing soft devices for invasive procedures bears great importance for human health. The softness and large strain actuation of responsive hydrogels promise the potential to fabricate soft devices, which can attach on and assist to the function of organs. The key challenges lie in the fabrication of soft devices with robust actuating ability an...

Compared to the conventional rigid robots, the soft robots driven by soft active materials possess unique advantages with their high adaptability in field exploration and seamless interaction with human. As one type of soft robot, soft aquatic robots play important roles in the application of ocean exploration and engineering. However, the soft rob...

Soft robots driven by stimuli-responsive materials have unique advantages over conventional rigid robots, especially in their high adaptability for field exploration and seamless interaction with humans. The grand challenge lies in achieving self-powered soft robots with high mobility, environmental tolerance, and long endurance. We are able to adv...

Soft robot is a novel category of robotics. Possessing the characteristics of high flexibility, high environmental adaptability, high compatibility and multi-functionality, soft robots are quite promising in research and practical applications. The performances of soft robots are largely enhanced by the unique properties of smart materials, which p...

Dielectric elastomer membrane has the ability of shrinking the thickness and expanding surface area when a voltage is applied through its thickness. Dielectric elastomer has been widely studied and used as dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA), dielectric elastomer generator (DEG) and dielectric elastomer sensor (DES). We study the behavior of severa...

Inspired by natural plants, thermoresponding hydrogel (TRH) structures have been designed to trigger mechanical instability with fast actuation. Tough Ca-alginate/poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) hydrogel has been synthesized by the hybrid of physically cross-linked alginate and covalently cross-linked PNIPAM. The tough Ca-alginate/PNIPAM hydro...