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Body-Centred Cubic (BCC) lattices with twinned meta-crystal architecture inspired by the strengthening of bulk metals have significantly improved mechanical performance; however, their deformation behaviour and underlying strengthening…
Lizards and insects can strongly attach to walls and then detach applying negligible additional forces. We propose a simple mechanical model of this phenomenon which implies active muscle control. We show that the detachment force may…
Continuum robots with variable compliance have gained significant attention due to their adaptability in unstructured environments. Among various stiffness modulation techniques, layer jamming (LJ) provides a simple yet effective approach…
Self-shaping of curved structures, especially those involving flexible thin layers, has attracted increasing attention because of their broad potential applications in e.g. nanoelectromechanical/micro-electromechanical systems (NEMS/MEMS),…
Hygro-responsive materials exhibit a complex structure-to-property relationship. The interactions of water within these materials under varying hygric and mechanical loads play a crucial role in their macroscopic deformation and final…
We present a novel continuous optimization method to the discrete problem of quadtree optimization. The optimization aims at achieving a quadtree structure with the highest mechanical stiffness, where the edges in the quadtree are…
In this paper, we present the realization of an elastic metamaterial allowing independent tuning of negative density and stiffness for elastic waves propagating along a designated direction. In electromagnetic (or acoustic) metamaterials,…
We study the structural properties of two-dimensional granular packings prepared by random deposition from a source line. We consider a class of random ballistic deposition models based on single-particle relaxation rules controlled by a…
The outstanding mechanical properties of high-manganese steels (HMnS) are a result of their high strain-hardenability. That is facilitated by strong suppression of dynamic recovery, predominant planar glide, and the activation of additional…
In this paper, gradient-based optimization methods are combined with finite-element modeling for improving electric devices. Geometric design parameters are considered by affine decomposition of the geometry or by the design element…
We investigate the mechanical behavior of jammed knitted fabrics, where geometric confinement leads to an initially stiff mechanical response that softens into low stiffness behavior with additional applied stress. We show that the jammed…
Assembling lattices from discrete building blocks enables the composition of large, heterogeneous, and easily reconfigurable objects with desirable mass-to-stiffness ratios. This type of building system may also be referred to as a digital…
By learning Variable Impedance Control policy, robot assistants can intelligently adapt their manipulation compliance to ensure both safe interaction and proper task completion when operating in human-robot interaction environments. In this…
The ever increasing need for performance results in increasingly rigorous demands on throughput and positioning accuracy of high-precision motion systems, which often suffer from position dependent effects that originate from relative…
The paper focuses on the enhanced stiffness modeling of robotic manipulators by taking into account influence of the external force/torque acting upon the end point. It implements the virtual joint technique that describes the compliance of…
Soft electronics have recently gathered considerable interest thanks to their bio-mechanical compatibility. An important feature of such deformable conductors is their electrical response to strain. While development of stretchable…
Investigation of inhomogeneities has wide applications in different areas of mechanics including the study of composite materials. Here, we analytically study an arbitrarily-shaped isotropic inhomogeneity embedded in a finite-sized…
Birds rely on active high-acceleration morphing and flapping to navigate complex airflows, but they can also maintain stable fixed-wing postures under persistent atmospheric disturbances. Here, we show that avian wings exhibit aerodynamic…
This paper presents a new control, namely additive-state-decomposition dynamic inversion stabilized control, that is used to stabilize a class of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems subject to nonparametric time-varying uncertainties…
Merging and splitting are of great significance for rigid body networks in making such networks reconfigurable. The main challenges lie in simultaneously ensuring the compositionality of the distributed controllers and the mesh stability of…