Cephalopod Inspired Camouflage Skins: Adaptive Color Changing, Pattern Tuning and Texture Morphing

Camouflage is an important technology that has a broad range of applications, especially in defense areas. The objective of this proposal is to develop a stretchable elastic synthetic skin that can adaptively change its color and pattern, and meanwhile tune its morphology. The proposed research effort involves the development of several key synthetic organs including distributed opsins, pixelated colorphores, and texture morphable skins. The outcomes of this proposal include not only the first elastic camouflage skin with automatic color changing, pattern tuning, and 3D texture morphing functions, but also benchmark adaptive camouflage operations from sensing and actuating based on rubbery electronics and groundbreaking technology for texture morphing.