Actively reconfigurable flexible electronics enabled by robotic technologies would provide opportunities to extensively broaden the application areas of flexible electronics compared with their passively flexible counterparts. Diverse reconfigurable shapes can be enabled by localized control of the film-type electronics while keeping a thin form factor for flexible electronics. The flexible electronics are usually designed to be thin to lower mechanical stress or strain when bending. In this article, we present a locally actuatable film designed to control actuating regions, bending directions, and curvatures by the electrical inputs. The film is in a thin form factor with multichannels realized by the proposed method of crimping electrical wires over shape memory alloy wires. The industry standard process should be convenient in terms of scaling up, increasing channels, or adding reconfigurable shapes for new applications. We demonstrate shape-changeable displays, self-rollable photovoltaics, and light art to prove the feasibility of the concept.
Keywords: flexible electronics; locally actuatable film; shape memory alloy; shape-changeable electronics; soft robotics.