Related papers: Building the Space Elevator: Lessons from Biologic…
A robot cannot lift up an object if it is not feasible to do so. However, in most research on robot lifting, "feasibility" is usually presumed to exist a priori. This paper proposes a three-step method for a humanoid robot to reason about…
Catastrophic failure of materials and structures due to unstable crack growth could be prevented if facture toughness could be enhanced at will through structural design, but how can this be possible if fracture toughness is a material…
Materials with negative Poisson ratio have the counter-intuitive property of expanding laterally when they are stretched longitudinally. They are accordingly termed auxetic, from the Greek auxesis meaning to increase. Experimental studies…
Humanoid robots are envisioned as general-purpose platforms in human-centered environments, yet their deployment is limited by vulnerability to falls and the risks posed by rigid metal-plastic structures to people and surroundings. We…
Ba\v{z}ant et al. have proposed a model of a gravity-driven collapse of a tall building which collapses in a progressive-floor collapse after the failure of a single storey. The model allows the re-computation of the structural resistance…
Biological lifeforms can heal, grow, adapt, and reproduce -- abilities essential for sustained survival and development. In contrast, robots today are primarily monolithic machines with limited ability to self-repair, physically develop, or…
Back injuries are the most prevalent work-related musculoskeletal disorders and represent a major cause of disability. Although innovations in wearable robots aim to alleviate this hazard, the majority of existing exoskeletons are obtrusive…
Under Space Tower the author understands structures having height from 100 km to the geosynchronous orbit and supported by surface of Earths. The classical Space Elevator is not included in space towers. That has three main identifiers…
Structural cellular materials in nature, such as wood, trabecular bone, corals, and dentin combine complex biological functions with structural roles, such as skeletal support and impact protection1,2. They feature complex structural…
When a biological system robustly corrects component-level errors, the direct pressure on component performance declines. Components may become less reliable, maintain more genetic variability, or drift neutrally in design, creating the…
In this paper, first the non-standard limit analysis 2D problem for reinforced masonry structures is suitably reformulated, giving a innovative computational framework for the evaluation of the strengthening effects of tensile…
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to mankind's expansion throughout the Solar System is the prohibitive cost of escaping Earth's gravitational pull. In its many forms, the space-elevator provides a way to circumvent this cost, allowing payloads to…
Material strength is a classical concept with renewed importance in fracture mechanics, particularly in crack nucleation in brittle solids. We formulate material strength in finite elasticity and examine its geometric, constitutive, and…
Soft polymers are ubiquitous materials in nature and as engineering materials with properties varying from rate-independent to rate-dependent. Current fracture toughness measures are non-unique for rate-dependent soft materials for varying…
Mechanical metamaterials with engineered failure properties typically rely on periodic unit cell geometries or bespoke microstructures to achieve their unique properties. We demonstrate that intelligent use of disorder in metamaterials…
We derive discrete and continuous class of mathematical models that describe a progressive collapse in a fictional one-dimensional structure, where we consider plastic and elastic types of collisions. We examine static (collapse initiation…
The protein folding problem has attracted an increasing attention from physicists. The problem has a flavor of statistical mechanics, but possesses the most common feature of most biological problems -- the profound effects of evolution. I…
The concept of resilience embodies the quest towards the ability to sustain shocks, to suffer from these shocks as little as possible, for the shortest time possible, and to recover with the full functionalities that existed before the…
This paper presents an automatic approach for the evaluation of the plastic load and failure modes of planar frames. The method is based on the generation of elementary collapse mechanisms and on their linear combination aimed at minimizing…
With inspiration from arthropods' exoskeletons, we designed a simple, easily manufactured, semi-rigid structure with flexible joints that can passively damp impact energy. This exoskeleton fuses the protective shell to the main robot…