Related papers: A modular approach to adaptive structures
Moving a module in a modular robot is a very complex and error-prone process. Unlike in swarm, in the modular robots we are targeting, the moving module must keep the connection to, at least, one other module. In order to miniaturize each…
We use a continuous mesoscopic model to address the yielding properties of plastic composites, formed by a host material and inclusions with different elastic and/or plastic properties. We investigate the flow properties of the composed…
Cilia are motile biological appendages that are driven to bend by internal shear stresses between tubulin filaments. A continuum model of ciliary material is constructed that incorporates the essential ciliary constraints: (1)…
Multicellular aggregates are known to exhibit liquid-like properties. The fusion process of two cell aggregates is commonly studied as the coalescence of two viscous drops. However, tissues are complex materials and can exhibit viscoelastic…
Designing robotic systems that can change their physical form factor as well as their compliance to adapt to environmental constraints remains a major conceptual and technical challenge. To address this, we introduce the Granulobot, a…
In this article, a novel explicit approach for designing complex thin-walled structures based on the Moving Morphable Component (MMC) method is proposed, which provides a unified framework to systematically address various design issues,…
Animals excel at adapting their intentions, attention, and actions to the environment, making them remarkably efficient at interacting with a rich, unpredictable and ever-changing external world, a property that intelligent machines…
Biomolecular structures are assemblies of emergent anisotropic building modules such as uniaxial helices or biaxial strands. We provide an approach to understanding a marginally compact phase of matter that is occupied by proteins and DNA.…
Bundles of filamentous polymers are primary structural components of a broad range of cytoskeletal structures, and their mechanical properties play key roles in cellular functions ranging from locomotion to mechanotransduction and…
This paper introduces a new shape-matching methodology, combinative matching, to combine interlocking parts for geometric shape assembly. Previous methods for geometric assembly typically rely on aligning parts by finding identical surfaces…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
The collective migration of epithelial groups of cells plays a central role in processes such as embryo development, wound healing, and cancer invasion. While finite cell clusters are known to collectively migrate in response to external…
An object-oriented combinator chemistry was used to construct an artificial organism with a system architecture possessing characteristics necessary for organisms to evolve into more complex forms. This architecture supports modularity by…
Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…
Through the utilization of smart materials and well-designed structures, functional surfaces have been developed to enable small-scale liquid/solid manipulation tasks, thereby facilitating crucial applications in the fields of…
A new type of microfluidic system for biological cell manipulation, a CMOS/microfluidic hybrid, is demonstrated. The hybrid system starts with a custom-designed CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) chip fabricated in a…
This work introduces a novel, fully robust and highly-scalable, $h$-adaptive aggregated unfitted finite element method for large-scale interface elliptic problems. The new method is based on a recent distributed-memory implementation of the…
The mechanisms driving the collective movement of cells remain poorly understood. To contribute toward resolving this mystery, a model was formulated to theoretically explore the possible functions of polarized cell-cell adhesion in…
This article explores the design and experimentation of a neural network architecture capable of dynamically adjusting its internal structure based on the input data. The proposed model introduces a routing mechanism that allows each layer…
Hybrid photonic integration exploits complementary strengths of different material platforms, thereby offering superior performance and design flexibility in comparison to monolithic approaches. This applies in particular to multi-chip…