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The modification of electronic band structures and the subsequent tuning of electrical, optical, and thermal material properties is a central theme in the engineering and fundamental understanding of solid-state systems. In this scenario,…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
Mechanical meta-materials are solids whose geometric structure results in exotic nonlinear behaviors that are not typically achievable via homogeneous materials. We show how to drastically expand the design space of a class of mechanical…
Kirigami, the creative art of paper cutting, is a promising paradigm for mechanical metamaterials. However, to make kirigami-inspired structures a reality requires controlling the topology of kirigami to achieve connectivity and rigidity.…
Nanostructured dielectric metasurfaces offer unprecedented opportunities to manipulate light by imprinting an arbitrary phase-gradient on an impinging wavefront. This has resulted in the realization of a range of flat analogs to classical…
For most acoustic metamaterials, once they have been fabricated, their operating frequencies and functions cannot be adjusted, which is an intrinsic barrier for development of realistic applications. The study to overcome this limit has…
Contact-based decision and planning methods are becoming increasingly important to endow higher levels of autonomy for legged robots. Formal synthesis methods derived from symbolic systems have great potential for reasoning about high-level…
The evolution of optical technologies necessitates advanced solutions for selective and dynamic manipulation of light's degrees of freedom, including amplitude, phase, polarization, wavelength, and angular momentum. Metamaterials can offer…
Non-rigid 3D mesh matching is a critical step in computer vision and computer graphics pipelines. We tackle matching meshes that contain topological artefacts which can break the assumption made by current approaches. While Functional Maps…
Replicating and surpassing the autonomy of natural organisms remains a long-standing goal in robotics. Yet most robotic systems have their structure, materials, and control designed separately, in sharp contrast to the co-evolution in…
Reconfigurable mechanical systems enable precise programmable control over structural properties, opening new opportunities in architected materials, adaptive devices, and multifunctional structures. Here, we introduce elastic rod origami…
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…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…
The ability of mechanical systems to perform basic computations has gained traction over recent years, providing an unconventional alternative to digital computing in off grid, low power, and severe environments which render the majority of…
Active solids such as cell collectives, colloidal clusters, and active metamaterials exhibit diverse collective phenomena, ranging from rigid body motion to shape-changing mechanisms. The nonlinear dynamics of such active materials remains…
Topological mechanics can realize soft modes in mechanical metamaterials in which the number of degrees of freedom for particle motion is finely balanced by the constraints provided by interparticle interactions. However, solid objects are…
Curvature and mechanics are intimately connected for thin materials, and this coupling between geometry and physical properties is readily seen in folded structures from intestinal villi and pollen grains, to wrinkled membranes and…
Shape morphing magnetic soft materials, composed of magnetic particles in a soft polymer matrix, can transform shapes reversibly, remotely, and rapidly, finding diverse applications in actuators, soft robotics, and biomedical devices. To…
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…
Networks found in the real-world are numerous and varied. A common type of network is the heterogeneous network, where the nodes (and edges) can be of different types. Accordingly, there have been efforts at learning representations of…