Related papers: Bioinspired Materials with Self-Adaptable Mechanic…
Mechanical metamaterials are increasingly attracting interest in engineering applications due to their unique mechanical properties and lightweight nature. This study develops a novel sound-based representation to characterize the…
The process of self-morphing in curved surfaces found in nature, such as with the growth of flowers and leaves, has generated interest in the study of self-morphing bilayers, which has been used in many soft robots or switchers. However,…
In biological systems, sensing is not performed by the brain alone: the body deforms, vibrates, and filters external stimuli before they are transduced into neural signals. In engineered systems, this processing burden is placed largely on…
Magnetic elastomers are appealing materials from an application point of view: they combine the mechanical softness and deformability of polymeric substances with the addressability by external magnetic fields. In this way, mechanical…
Architectural transformations play a key role in the evolution of complex systems, from design algorithms for metamaterials to flow and plasticity of disordered media. Here, we develop a general framework for the evolution of the linear…
Biological materials achieve directional reinforcement with oriented assemblies of anisotropic building blocks. One such example is the nanocomposite structure of keratinized epithelium on the toe pad of tree frogs, in which hexagonal…
Frictional influences in tendon-driven robotic systems are generally unwanted, with efforts towards minimizing them where possible. In the human hand however, the tendon-pulley system is found to be frictional with a difference between…
Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally-responsive materials therefore open up the possibility of creating a…
Natural hard composites like human bone possess a combination of strength and toughness that exceeds that of their constituents and of many engineered composites. This augmentation is attributed to their complex hierarchical structure,…
Efficient material logistics play a critical role in controlling costs and schedules in the construction industry. However, manual material handling remains prone to inefficiencies, delays, and safety risks. Autonomous forklifts offer a…
Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge.…
Metamaterials benefit from unique architected patterns to achieve lightweight with exceptional mechanical properties inaccessible to conventional materials. Typical mechanical metamaterials are inspired by crystal-like lattice structures,…
States of self stress, organizations of internal forces in many-body systems that are in equilibrium with an absence of external forces, can be thought of as the constitutive building blocks of the elastic response of a material. In…
Organogenesis involves large deformations and complex shape changes that require elaborate mechanical regulation. Models of tissue biomechanics have been introduced to account for the coupling between mechanical response and biochemical…
Every robot built to date was predesigned by an external process, prior to deployment. Here we show a robot that actively participates in its own design during its lifetime. Starting from a randomly assembled body, and using only…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
Developing successful scaffolds requires clinicians to adopt a multidisciplinary approach in order to understand and stimulate the natural bone regeneration process. A variety of natural and synthetic biomaterials, including naturally…
An architectural approach to self-adaptive systems involves runtime change of system configuration (i.e., the system's components, their bindings and operational parameters) and behaviour update (i.e., component orchestration). Thus,…
Spinodal metamaterials, with architectures inspired by natural phase-separation processes, have presented a significant alternative to periodic and symmetric morphologies when designing mechanical metamaterials with extreme performance.…
Inspired by natural cellular materials such as trabecular bone, lattice structures have been developed as a new type of lightweight material. In this paper we present a novel method to design lattice structures that conform with both the…