Move Over Motors, Here Come Mini-Muscles

Feb. 18, 2003 -- For years, toy makers have been stuffing tiny bits of technology inside of dolls to make them more lifelike.

At the centennial American International Toy Fair in New York this week, some of the embedded technology is obvious — computer chips to give the plastic doll a simulated voice, for example.

While all of those dolls may be crying for the attention of buyers responsible for stocking the shelves of the nation's toy stores, Playmates Toys thinks its latest doll can capture its audience with a simple ploy: the mere batting of eyelashes.

Its Baby Bright Eyes doll has large simulated eyes that open, move and blink in response to what the child is doing. For example, place a "bottle" in the doll's mouth and the eyes automatically look down at it — just like a real baby would.

Dolls have been motorized before, says Nancy Goldblum, vice president of marketing of girls' toys for Playmates Toys. So what's so different about Baby Bright Eyes' simulated peepers?

"These [dolls] are totally silent," says Goldblum. "The eyes move in a totally smooth, silent, lifelike motion and that's what it's really about."

And to produce those quiet human-like eye movements, Playmates is turning to a "motor" that acts more like a human muscle than a mechanical device crammed with magnets and noisy gears.

Modernizing Micro-Muscles

The mechanical "muscles" are being developed by a 4-year-old startup called NanoMuscle Inc. in Antioch, Calif.

The NanoMuscle devices are smaller than a matchstick but can lift or move objects that weigh up to 200 grams — nearly half a pound. What's more, the imitation muscles use one-fifth the power traditional electromagnetic motors of similar capabilities would need.

The secret behind NanoMuscles is a decades old technology called Shape Memory Alloys.

First developed by the U.S. Navy Ordinance Laboratory in the 1960s, SMA uses materials that change shape when an electrical current is passed through them. Send a tiny charge through SMA wires and they contract, just like a human muscle. Remove the current, and the wires return to their original form.

But the problem with early SMA motors, typically made of wires of nickel and titanium metals, was that they had limited "life cycles." The muscles could flex only about 1,000 times before they wore out or began to move unpredictably.

Rod MacGregor, president and CEO of NanoMuscle, says his engineers have overcome SMA's limitations by using finer particles of titanium and nickel alloys, as well as coupling the materials to microcomputer chips with specialized software.

Through these advances in material sciences and computer miniaturization, MacGregor claims NanoMuscles have an expected life cycle of more than 1 million flexes. "We've made [SMA] reliable and reproducible," he says.

Pump It Up

What's more, MacGregor says the technology could be "scalable" — lifting larger loads without too much additional size or girth.

"If you look at a human muscle, it's made of striated strands of muscle cells," says MacGregor. "If you need a stronger muscle, you just have thicker strands."

By his calculations, a simple trebling of the wires' diameters from 50 micrometers (or thousandths of a meter) to 150 would give NanoMuscle a nine-times increase in lifting power.

And while Baby Bright Eyes might be the first commercial application of NanoMuscles, MacGregor expects the capabilities of these mimicked muscles can be used in many other applications.

Watch Out, Motown?

In cars, for example, MacGregor says NanoMuscles could replace the motors that move mirrors and door locks. In other consumer electronics, such as cameras, the ersatz muscles could power the zoom lens or even advance the film. And since there are no complex moving parts like gears, such devices would operate in almost complete silence.

MacGregor says the company has contracted a South Korean firm to produce the NanoMuscles for Playmates' Baby Bright Eyes. And although he won't disclose exactly how much the NanoMuscles cost compared to traditional motors, he says that high-volume production will drive the device down to "significantly less than a dollar."

It remains to be seen if NanoMuscle's device will really make a move in the $3 billion market for miniature motors. But Playmates' Goldblum believes MacGregor and his company have hit one out of the park — at least for the toy industry.

"We're always seeing new inventions and concepts for new dolls," says Goldblum. "The first time we saw a [NanoMuscle] prototype, it blew us away."

Playmates Toys' Baby Bright Eyes is expected to hit American toy stores next Christmas and set parents back about $50.