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Deployable structures, essential across various engineering applications ranging from umbrellas to satellites, are evolving to include soft, morphable designs where geometry drives transformation. However, a major challenge for soft…
Soft electronics have recently gathered considerable interest thanks to their bio-mechanical compatibility. An important feature of such deformable conductors is their electrical response to strain. While development of stretchable…
To achieve real-world functionality, robots must have the ability to carry out decision-making computations. However, soft robots stretch and therefore need a solution other than rigid computers. Examples of embedding computing capacity…
The escalating plastic waste crisis demands global action, yet mechanical recycling - currently the most prevalent strategy - remains severely underutilized. Only a small fraction of the total plastic waste is recycled in this manner,…
Fabric has been a fundamental part of human life for thousands of years, providing comfort, protection, and aesthetic expression. While modern advancements have enhanced fabric's functionality, it remains static and unchangeable, failing to…
Biological muscles have always attracted robotics researchers due to their efficient capabilities in compliance, force generation, and mechanical work. Many groups are working on the development of artificial muscles, however,…
The exciting field of stretchable electronics (SE) promises numerous novel applications, particularly in-body and medical diagnostics devices. However, future advanced SE miniature devices will require high-density, extremely stretchable…
The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…
The mechanics of animal cells is strongly determined by stress fibers, which are contractile filament bundles that form dynamically in response to extracellular cues. Stress fibers allow the cell to adapt its mechanics to environmental…
Knitting turns yarn, a 1D material, into a 2D fabric that is flexible, durable [1], and can be patterned to adopt a wide range of 3D geometries [2]. Like other mechanical metamaterials [3], the elasticity of knitted fabrics is an emergent…
Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of…
Generating realistic clothing for virtual applications like online retail and digital avatars is crucial but requires expert knowledge of 3D tools to generating believable simulations. Recently, a number of works proposed to estimate cloth…
Nanoscale electronics and novel fabrication technologies bear unique opportunities for self-assembling multi-billion component systems in a largely random manner, which would likely lower fabrication costs significantly compared to a…
A design problem of finding an optimally stiff membrane structure by selecting one-dimensional fiber reinforcements is formulated and solved. The membrane model is derived in a novel manner from a particular three-dimensional linear elastic…
Harnessing the rich nonlinear dynamics of highly-deformable materials has the potential to unlock the next generation of functional smart materials and devices. However, unlocking such potential requires effective strategies to spatially…
Understanding how to produce forces using biomolecular building blocks is essential for the development of adaptive synthetic cells and living materials. Here we ask whether a dynamic polymer system can generate deformation forces in soft…
Materials used in real clothing exhibit remarkable complexity and spatial variation due to common processes such as stitching, hemming, dyeing, printing, padding, and bonding. Simulating these materials, for instance using finite element…
Recently, suction-based robotic systems with microscopic features or active suction components have been proposed to grip rough and irregular surfaces. However, sophisticated fabrication methods or complex control systems are required for…
Tunable metasurfaces enable active and on-demand control over optical wavefronts through reconfigurable scattering of resonant nanostructures. Here, we present novel insights inspired by mechanical metamaterials to achieve giant tunability…
Developing soft robots that can control their own life-cycle and degrade on-demand while maintaining hyper-elasticity is a significant research challenge. On-demand degradable soft robots, which conserve their original functionality during…