Skip to content
Are you familiar with pop tubes? Resembling the corrugated section of a bendy straw, they are at the core of PopTuber, an intriguing research project from the Actuated Experience Lab at the University of Chicago.
With five motors and specialized gears a pop tube can be formed into complex, arbitrary shapes, and just as easily reset.
PopTuber shows how five motors and some specialized gears are all it takes to bend pop tubes into complex and stable 3D shapes. One can design the shapes in software, feed a pop tube into the shaper, and watch the device do the work. Importantly, the device can just as easily reset and re-use the tube. Watch the video (embedded below the page break) to see it in action and get a feel for what it can do.
In concept, it’s a little like a wire-bending machine, although wire benders are bulkier in comparison, more complex to scale, and unbending a wire is a separate process with its own hardware.
