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Self-folding origami, structures that are engineered flat to fold into targeted, three-dimensional shapes, have many potential engineering applications. Though significant effort in recent years has been devoted to designing fold patterns…
Robotic manipulation of deformable and fragile objects presents significant challenges, as excessive stress can lead to irreversible damage to the object. While existing solutions rely on accurate object models or specialized sensors and…
Propagating transition fronts, in which local interactions sequentially trigger state changes, are widely observed across natural, biological, and engineered systems. While such propagation has been engineered using energy-driven…
Designing and fabricating structures with specific mechanical properties requires understanding the intricate relationship between design parameters and performance. Understanding the design-performance relationship becomes increasingly…
Rigid origami is a branch of origami with great potential in engineering applications to deal with rigid-panel folding. One of the challenges is to compactly fold the polyhedra made from rigid facets with a single degree of freedom. In this…
Rigid origami has shown potential in large diversity of practical applications. However, current rigid origami crease pattern design mostly relies on known tessellations. This strongly limits the diversity and novelty of patterns that can…
This paper considers the shape formation problem within the 3D hybrid model, where a single agent with a strictly limited viewing range and the computational capacity of a deterministic finite automaton manipulates passive tiles through…
Nematic elastomers dramatically change their shape in response to diverse stimuli including light and heat. In this paper, we provide a systematic framework for the design of complex three dimensional shapes through the actuation of…
It is of interest to fabricate curved surfaces in three dimensions from easily available homogeneous material in the form of flat sheets. The aim is not just to obtain a surface $M$ in $\mathbb{R}^3$ which has a desired intrinsic Riemannian…
The geometry of bending-active kirigami arches, decorated by cuts and holes, is strongly influenced by the location and geometry of the perforations. This study demonstrates that, in some instances, the geometric stiffening induced by…
Soft robot serial chain manipulators with the capability for growth, stiffness control, and discrete joints have the potential to approach the dexterity of traditional robot arms, while improving safety, lowering cost, and providing an…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
Twisting sheets as a strategy to form functional yarns relies on millennia of human practice in making catguts and fabric wearables, but still lacks overarching principles to guide their intricate architectures. We show that twisted…
This work proposes a novel generative design tool for passive grippers -- robot end effectors that have no additional actuation and instead leverage the existing degrees of freedom in a robotic arm to perform grasping tasks. Passive…
Electro-thermally actuated origami provides a novel method for creating 3-D systems with advanced morphing and functional capabilities. However, it is currently difficult to simulate the multi-physical behavior of such systems because the…
Rotational erection system (RES) represents an origami-based design method for generating a three-dimensional (3D) structure from a planar sheet without compression. Its rotational and translational kinematics is fully encoded in a form of…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
Toolpath optimization of metal-based additive manufacturing processes is currently hampered by the high-dimensionality of its design space. In this work, a reinforcement learning platform is proposed that dynamically learns toolpath…
Deep learning is a promising, ultra-fast approach for inverse design in nano-optics, but despite fast advancement of the field, the computational cost of dataset generation, as well as of the training procedure itself remains a major…