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The adaptive and surprising emergent properties of biological materials self-assembled in far-from-equilibrium environments serve as an inspiration for efforts to design nanomaterials and their properties. In particular, controlling the…
3D printing enables the fabrication of complex architectures by automating long sequences of additive steps. The increasing sophistication of printers, materials, and generative design promises to make geometric complexity a non-issue in…
For the last thirty years, a large variety of memory allocators have been proposed. Since performance, memory usage and energy consumption of each memory allocator differs, software engineers often face difficult choices in selecting the…
We introduce an elastic-driven self-folding approach that fabricates robots directly from flat 3D-printed conductive PLA nets. Elastic bands routed through printed hooks store energy that folds the sheet into programmed 3D geometries, while…
The demand for structured light with a reconfigurable spatial and polarization distribution has been increasing across a wide range of fundamental and advanced photonics applications, including microscopy, imaging, sensing, communications,…
Autonomous materials research systems allow scientists to fail smarter, learn faster, and spend less resources in their studies. As these systems grow in number, capability, and complexity, a new challenge arises - how will they work…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
Shape displays are a class of haptic devices that enable whole-hand haptic exploration of 3D surfaces. However, their scalability is limited by the mechanical complexity and high cost of traditional actuator arrays. In this paper, we…
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a promising solution for handling the complexity of fabricating soft robots. However, the AM of hyperelastic materials is still challenging with a limited material range. Within this work, pellet-based 3D…
Soft deployable structures - unlike conventional piecewise rigid deployables based on hinges and springs - can assume intricate 3-D shapes, thereby enabling transformative technologies in soft robotics, shape-morphing architecture, and…
Increasing research efforts have been made to improve the energy efficiency of variable impedance actuators (VIAs) through reduction of energy consumption. However, the harvesting of dissipated energy in such systems remains underexplored.…
Shape-changing interfaces are promising for users to change the physical properties of common objects. However, prevailing approaches of actuation devices require either professional equipment or materials that are not commonly accessible…
Atomically thin semiconductors exhibit tunable exciton resonances that can be harnessed for dynamic manipulation of visible light in ultra-compact metadevices. However, the rapid nonradiative decay and dephasing of excitons at room…
Multi-step pathways, constituted of a sequence of reconfigurations, are central to a wide variety of natural and man-made systems. Such pathways autonomously execute in self-guided processes such as protein folding and self-assembly, but…
Modular reconfigurable manipulators enable quick adaptation and versatility to address different application environments and tailor to the specific requirements of the tasks. Task performance significantly depends on the manipulator's…
We present a simple, accessible method for autonomously transforming flat plastic sheets into intricate three-dimensional structures using only uniform heating and common tools such as household ovens and scissors. Our approach combines…
Energy absorbing materials, like foams used in protective equipment, are able to undergo large deformations under low stresses, reducing the incoming stress wave below an injury or damage threshold. They are typically effective in absorbing…
We present a generic framework for modelling three-dimensional deformable shells of active matter that captures the orientational dynamics of the active particles and hydrodynamic interactions on the shell and with the surrounding…
We present the design, characterization, and experimental results for a new modular robotic system for programmable self-assembly. The proposed system uses the Hybrid Cube Model (HCM), which integrates classical features from both…
4D printing of flat sheets that self-fold into architected 3D structures is a powerful origami-inspired approach for the fabrication of multi-functional devices and metamaterials. The possibility to endow the initially flat sheet with a…