Morphing Design for Socially Interactive Autonomous Car by Multi-Material 3D-Printing

An autonomous car, also known as a robot car, self-driving car, is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and moving with little or no human control. In most cases today, a driver can switch "driving mode" of his/her car between manual and autonomous. However, while the mode can be smartly changed, it is not able to show the current driving mode to nearby pedestrians. This might become a source of anxieties for many ordinary people living in the era of autonomous car. To overcome this issue, we propose to create a car with new expressive functions, and make it communicable and interactive. Unlike conventional approaches which use displays and LEDs, our approach is to develop 3D shape-transforming, morphable body of a car by using multi-material 3D-printing. Our first trial with printed soft membranes was successful in representing three different modes of a car seamlessly. In this paper, we introduce our concept, core technologies and implementations, and discuss further possibilities and future works.