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Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…
Polymer composites are ideal candidates for next generation biomimetic soft materials because of their exquisite bottom-up designability. However, the richness of behaviours comes at a price: the need for precise and extensive…
A robust grip is key to successful manipulation and joining of work pieces involved in any industrial assembly process. Stability of a grip depends on geometric and physical properties of the object as well as the gripper itself. Current…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Thermoplastic starch (TPS) is an excellent film-forming material, and adding fillers such as tetramethylammonium-montmorillonite (TMA-MMT) clay has significantly expanded its use in packaging applications. We first used all-atom (AA)…
Magnetic nanoflowers (MNFs), which exhibit large intrinsic magnetic losses and high specific absorption rates under clinically relevant alternating magnetic fields, highlight strong potential as efficient mediators for magnetic…
Robotic contact-rich and fine-grained manipulation remains a significant challenge due to complex interaction dynamics and the competing requirements of multi-timescale control. While current visual imitation learning methods excel at…
Soft materials capable of large inelastic deformation play an essential role in high-performance nacre-inspired architectured materials with a combination of stiffness, strength and toughness. The rigid "building blocks" made from glass or…
Plasticity is inherent to many engineering materials such as metals. While it can degrade the load-carrying capacity of structures via material yielding, it can also protect structures through plastic energy dissipation. To fully harness…
Adaptive structures are of interest for their ability to dynamically modify mechanical properties post fabrication, enabling structural performance that is responsive to environmental uncertainty and changing loading conditions. Dynamic…
Recent developments in the field of computational modeling of fracture have opened up possibilities for designing structures against failure. A special case, called interfacial fracture or delamination, can occur in loaded composite…
Differentiable physics simulation provides an avenue to tackle previously intractable challenges through gradient-based optimization, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of solving robotics-related problems. To apply differentiable…
We present an active learning framework for efficiently generating training data for machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs). The method combines local entropy-driven molecular dynamics with global dataset-aware filtering: a…
Shape adaptive shape memory alloy hybrid composites (SMAHCs) are composites that incorporate shape memory alloys (SMAs) to realize shape transformation. Despite the availability of numerous analytical and finite element models for…
Grasping deformable objects with varying stiffness remains a significant challenge in robotics. Estimating the local stiffness of a target object is important for determining an optimal grasp pose that enables stable pickup without damaging…
The paper presents a topology optimization approach that designs an optimal structure, called a self-supporting structure, which is ready to be fabricated via additive manufacturing without the usage of additional support structures. Such…
Self-assembled nano and micro-structures, particularly those capable of responsive erasure and regeneration, have garnered significant interest for their applications in smart photonics and electronics. However, current techniques for…
In this paper, we presented a data-driven framework to optimize the out-of-plane stiffness for soft grippers to achieve mechanical properties as hard-to-twist and easy-to-bend. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated in the design…
Controlling the deformation of flexible objects is challenging due to their non-linear dynamics and high-dimensional configuration space. This work presents a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) simulator targeted at control…
Assembling atomic layers of van der Waals materials (vdW) combines the physics of two materials, offering opportunities for novel functional devices. Realization of this has been possible because of advancements in nanofabrication processes…