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Gel-elastomer composites, comprising an active swellable hydrogel and a passive elastomer, are a compelling class of programmable material systems (PMS) capable of shape morphing under multiphysics actuation. The precise design of the…
We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…
We perform numerical simulations to study self-assembly of nanoparticles mediated by an elastic planar surface. We show how the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of these surfaces leads to anisotropic interactions between the…
Soft robots are known for their ability to perform tasks with great adaptability, enabled by their distributed, non-uniform stiffness and actuation. Bending is the most fundamental motion for soft robot design, but creating robust, and…
Soft pneumatic gripping strategies are often based on pressurized actuation of structures made of soft elastomeric materials, which limits designs in terms of size, weight, achievable forces, and ease of fabrication. On the other hand,…
Fiber-reinforced soft biological tissues are typically modeled as hyperelastic, anisotropic, and nearly incompressible materials. To enforce incompressibility a multiplicative split of the deformation gradient into a volumetric and an…
We give a method for modeling solid objects undergoing large spatially varying and/or anisotropic strains, and use it to reconstruct human anatomy from medical images. Our novel shape deformation method uses plastic strains and the Finite…
Soft robots enable safe, adaptive interaction with complex environments but remain difficult to sense and control due to their highly deformable structures. Architected soft materials such as helicoid lattices offer tunable stiffness and…
4D printing empowers 3D printed structures made of hydrogels, liquid crystals or shape memory polymers, with reversible morphing capabilities in response to an external stimulus. To apply reversible shape-change to stiff lightweight…
Pneumatic soft everting robotic structures have the potential to facilitate human transfer tasks due to their ability to grow underneath humans without sliding friction and their utility as a flexible sling when deflated. Tubular structures…
Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in…
We present an experimental protocol for the fabrication and characterization of scalable microarchitected elastic waveguides. Using silicon microfabrication techniques, we develop free-standing 2D truss-based architected waveguides with a…
From microactuators to biological tissues, non-porous materials with the ability to strongly expand when in contact with a solvent are ubiquitous. Consequently, the swelling of polymer systems such as hydrogel has received recently much…
Active metamaterials are a type of metamaterial with tunable properties enabled by structural reconfigurations. Existing active metamaterials often achieve only a limited number of structural reconfigurations upon the application of an…
Modeling arbitrarily large deformations of surfaces smoothly embedded in three-dimensional space is challenging. The difficulties come from two aspects: the existing geometry processing or forward simulation methods penalize the difference…
A design problem of finding an optimally stiff membrane structure by selecting one-dimensional fiber reinforcements is formulated and solved. The membrane model is derived in a novel manner from a particular three-dimensional linear elastic…
We present a method to fabricate double shell structures printed in trans-versal directions using multi-axis fused-deposition-modeling (FDM) robot-ic 3D printing. Shell structures, characterized by lightweight, thin walls, fast buildup, and…
Mechanical metamaterials leverage geometric design to achieve unconventional properties, such as high strength at low density, efficient wave guiding, and complex shape morphing. The ability to control shape changes builds on the complex…
Natural filaments, such as proteins, plant tendrils, octopus tentacles, and elephant trunks, can transform into arbitrary three-dimensional shapes that carry out vital functions. Their shape-morphing behavior arises from intricate…
Advances in 3D printing technology now enable the precise positioning of microscopic material voxels to form complex structures. Combined with emerging multi-material capabilities and printable responsive materials, this opens new…