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Metamaterials with functional responses can exhibit varying properties under different conditions (e.g., wave-based responses or deformation-induced property variation). This work addresses the rapid inverse design of such metamaterials to…
Existing Civil Engineering structures have limited capability to adapt their configurations for new functions, non-stationary environments, or future reuse. Although origami principles provide capabilities of dense packaging and…
Origami inspired architectures offer a powerful route toward lightweight, reconfigurable, and programmable robotic systems. Yet, a unified mechanics framework capable of seamlessly bridging rigid folding, elastic deformation, and stability…
Direct design of complex functional materials would revolutionize technologies ranging from printable organs to novel clean energy devices. However, even incremental steps towards designing functional materials have proven challenging. If…
Origami-inspired structures have a rich design space, offering new opportunities for the development of deployable systems that undergo large and complex yet predictable shape transformations. There has been growing interest in such…
Origami structures have been receiving a lot of attention from engineering and scientific researchers owing to their unique properties such as deployability, multi-stability, negative stiffness, etc. However, dynamic properties of origami…
The geometric design of structures with optimized physical and chemical properties is one of the core topics in materials science. However, designing new functional materials is challenging due to the vast number of existing and the…
Mimicking the perceptual functions of human cutaneous mechanoreceptors, artificial skins or flexible pressure sensors can transduce tactile stimuli to quantitative electrical signals. Conventional methods to design such devices follow a…
Direct numerical simulation of hierarchical materials via homogenization-based concurrent multiscale models poses critical challenges for 3D large scale engineering applications, as the computation of highly nonlinear and path-dependent…
Eating is a daily challenge for over 60 million adults with essential tremors and other mobility limitations. For these users, traditional utensils like forks or spoons are difficult to manipulate -- resulting in accidental spills and…
We propose a novel fast and accurate simulation framework for contact-intensive tight-tolerance robotic assembly tasks. The key components of our framework are as follows: 1) data-driven contact point clustering with a certain…
Biology is full of intricate molecular structures whose geometries are inextricably linked to their function. Many of these structures exhibit varying curvature, such as the helical structure of the bacterial flagellum, which is critical…
Lattices and their underlying symmetries play a central role in determining the physical properties and applications of many natural and engineered materials. By bridging the lattice geometry and rigid-folding kinematics, this study…
Soft robotics gripper have shown great promise in handling fragile and geometrically complex objects. However, most existing solutions rely on bulky actuators, complex control strategies, or advanced tactile sensing to achieve stable and…
Emerging multi-material 3D printing techniques have paved the way for the rational design of metamaterials with not only complex geometries but also arbitrary distributions of multiple materials within those geometries. Varying the spatial…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
The past decade has witnessed the advances of artificial intelligence with various applications in engineering. Recently, artificial neural network empowered inverse design for metasurfaces has been developed that can design on-demand…
This paper proposes a new control framework for manipulating soft objects. A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach is used to make the shape of a deformable object reach a set of desired points by controlling a robotic arm which…
Wearable fingertip haptic interfaces provide tactile stimuli on the fingerpads by applying skin pressure, linear and rotational shear, and vibration. Designing and fabricating a compact, multi-degree-of-freedom, and forceful fingertip…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…