Explosion-powered eversible tactile displays

High-resolution electronic tactile displays stand to transform haptics for
remote machine operation, virtual reality, and digital information access
for blind and visually impaired people. Yet, increasing their resolution
requires increasing the number of individually addressable actuators while
simultaneously reducing their total surface area, power consumption, and
weight, challenges most evidently reflected in the dearth of affordable
multiline braille displays. Blending principles from soft robotics,
microfluidics, and nonlinear mechanics, we introduce a 10x10 array of 2
millimeter-diameter, combustion-powered, eversible soft actuators that
individually rise in 0.24 milliseconds to repeatably produce display
patterns. Our rubber architecture is hermetically sealed and demonstrates
resistance to liquid and dirt ingress. Finally, we demonstrate complete
actuation cycles in an untethered tactile display prototype. Our platform
technology extends the capabilities of tactile displays to environments
currently inaccessible to traditional actuation modalities.