Related papers: Learning to self-fold at a bifurcation

The design of desired behaviors in mechanical metamaterials has produced remarkable advances but has generally neglected two aspects - the inevitable presence of undesired behaviors and the role of dynamics in avoiding such behaviors.…

Mechanical metamaterials are usually designed to show desired responses to prescribed forces. In some applications, the desired force-response relationship might be hard to specify exactly, although examples of forces and corresponding…

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…

Modeling folding surfaces with nonzero thickness is of practical interest for mechanical engineering. There are many existing approaches that account for material thickness in folding applications. We propose a new systematic and broadly…

The elastic behavior of materials operating in the linear regime is constrained, by definition, to operations that are linear in the imposed deformation. Though the nonlinear regime holds promise for new functionality, the design in this…

A novel bilayer is introduced, consisting of a stiff film adhered to a soft substrate with patterned holes beneath the film and substrate interface. To uncover the transition of surface patterns, two dimensional plane strain simulations are…

We investigate the crumpling of a sheet as it is repeatedly crushed onto itself by rolling it into a cylinder and twisting it axially while allowing the end-to-end length to evolve freely. As deduced from its plastic deformations, the sheet…

Soft materials, such as liquids, polymers, foams, gels, colloids, granular materials, and most soft biological materials, play an important role in our daily lives. From a mechanical viewpoint, soft materials can easily achieve large…

We consider disordered solids in which the microscopic elements can deform plastically in response to stresses on them. We show that by driving the system periodically, this plasticity can be exploited to train in desired elastic…

Robotic manipulation of slender objects is challenging, especially when the induced deformations are large and nonlinear. Traditionally, learning-based control approaches, such as imitation learning, have been used to address deformable…

The bistability of embedded elements provides a natural route through which to introduce reprogrammability to elastic meta-materials. One example of this is the soft morphable sheet, in which bistable elements that can be snapped up or…

We investigate the role of architected thin films in the interfacial failure properties of bi-layer composites. Our results show that, while graded structures can be used to prescribe failure at the interface, they do not offer significant…

We study the scaling properties of forced folding of thin materials of different geometry. The scaling relations implying the topological crossovers from the folding of threedimensional plates to the folding of two-dimensional sheets, and…

Materials and machines are often designed with particular goals in mind, so that they exhibit desired responses to given forces or constraints. Here we explore an alternative approach, namely physical coupled learning. In this paradigm, the…

The tenfold classification provides a powerful framework for organizing topological phases of matter based on symmetry and spatial dimension. However, it does not offer a systematic method for transitioning between classes or engineering…

The task of learning patterns is typically associated with systems that update parameters on fixed architectures, such as neural networks, where learning proceeds through continuous optimization. Here, we demonstrate that pattern learning…

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…

Topology is an important determinant of the behavior of a great number of condensed-matter systems, but until recently has played a minor role in elasticity. We develop a theory for the deformations of a class of twisted non-Euclidean…

Robotic fabric manipulation is challenging due to the infinite dimensional configuration space, self-occlusion, and complex dynamics of fabrics. There has been significant prior work on learning policies for specific deformable manipulation…

Incorporating geometric inductive biases into models can aid interpretability and generalization, but encoding to a specific geometric structure can be challenging due to the imposed topological constraints. In this paper, we theoretically…