Related papers: Autonomous Discovery of Tough Structures
With recent advances in both responsive materials and fabrication techniques it is now possible to construct integrated functional structures, composed of both structural and active materials. We investigate the robust design of such…
Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…
Discovering and optimizing commercially viable materials for clean energy applications typically takes over a decade. Self-driving laboratories that iteratively design, execute, and learn from material science experiments in a fully…
The ability to accurately quantify the performance an additively manufactured (AM) product is important for a widespread industry adoption of AM as the design is required to: (1) satisfy geometrical constraints, (2) satisfy structural…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
Robotic performance emerges from the coupling of body and controller, yet it remains unclear when morphology-control co-design is necessary. We present a unified framework that embeds morphology and control parameters within a single neural…
The true power of computational research typically can lay in either what it accomplishes or what it enables others to accomplish. In this work, both avenues are simultaneously embraced across several distinct efforts existing at three…
The protein folding problem has attracted an increasing attention from physicists. The problem has a flavor of statistical mechanics, but possesses the most common feature of most biological problems -- the profound effects of evolution. I…
Few questions in condensed matter science have proven as difficult to unravel as the interplay between structure and dynamics in supercooled liquids and glasses. The conundrum: close to the glass transition, the dynamics slow down…
Developing safe autonomous driving systems is a major scientific and technical challenge. Existing AI-based end-to-end solutions do not offer the necessary safety guarantees, while traditional systems engineering approaches are defeated by…
Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no…
Adaptive systems -- such as a biological organism gaining survival advantage, an autonomous robot executing a functional task, or a motor protein transporting intracellular nutrients -- must model the regularities and stochasticity in their…
The microstructure critically governs the properties of materials used in energy and chemical engineering technologies, from catalysts and filters to thermal insulators and sensors. Therefore, accurate design is based on quantitative…
An Autonomous Physical System (APS) will be expected to reliably and independently evaluate, execute, and achieve goals while respecting surrounding rules, laws, or conventions. In doing so, an APS must rely on a broad spectrum of dynamic,…
Besides performance, efficiency is a key design driver of technologies supporting vehicular perception. Indeed, a well-balanced trade-off between performance and energy consumption is crucial for the sustainability of autonomous vehicles.…
Multicopters are becoming increasingly important in both civil and military fields. Currently, most multicopter propulsion systems are designed by experience and trial-and-error experiments, which are costly and ineffective. This paper…
One of the biggest perceived challenges in building megastructures, such as the space elevator, is the unavailability of materials with sufficient tensile strength. The presumed necessity of very strong materials stems from a design…
Approaches to keeping a dynamical system within state constraints typically rely on a model-based safety condition to limit the control signals. In the face of significant modeling uncertainty, the system can suffer from important…
Superomniphobic textures are at the frontier of surface design for vast arrays of applications. Despite recent significant advances in fabrication methods for reentrant and doubly reentrant microstructures, design optimisation remains a…
Designing materials that can effectively and repeatedly absorb energy from unpredictable directions represents a grand challenge in modern engineering, crucial for applications from vehicle crashworthiness systems to personal protective…