ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen the emergence of many efforts to embed computing resources in everyday environments. These efforts have ranged from the use of wireless sensor networks, to wired ubiquitous computing environments in homes and commercial installations. A promising culmination of these directions is that of general purpose flexible surfaces, with large numbers of computational, sensing, and actuation elements embedded in them. Thin and flexible sheets of general purpose active materials could find use in a variety of commercial and household applications. These materials with embedded computation, sensing, and actuation capabilities, may be deployed cheaply over large surfaces, for both the interiors and exteriors of buildings, automobiles, marine vessels (e.g., as a hull lining), and aerospace applications. Such active or computational surfaces will take advantage of their large contiguous spatial extents, and the ability to actuate these surfaces. Such an active material with embedded actuators might be used in building structures that self-repair, or adapt to weather conditions.
