Related papers: A universal material model subroutine for soft mat…
Roboticists have been seeking to address this situation in recent years through the use of soft robots. Unfortunately, identifying appropriate models for the complete analysis and investigation of soft robots for design and control purposes…
We investigate the numerical implementation of functionally graded properties in the context of the finite element method. The macroscopic variation of elastic properties inherent to functionally graded materials (FGMs) is introduced at the…
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…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
The rapid development of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications requires the training of large numbers of models. This growing demand highlights the importance of training models without human supervision, while…
Soft robots offer adaptability and safe interaction with complex environments. Rapid prototyping kits that allow soft robots to be assembled easily will allow different geometries to be explored quickly to suit different environments or to…
The recently proposed soft finite element method (SoftFEM) reduces the stiffness (condition numbers), consequently improving the overall approximation accuracy. The method subtracts a least-square term that penalizes the gradient jumps…
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…
Mechanical metamaterials are artificially engineered microstructures that exhibit novel mechanical behavior on the macroscopic scale. Active metamaterials can be externally controlled. Pneumatically actuated metamaterials can change their…
In general, there is a mismatch between a finite element model {(FEM)} of a structure and its real behaviour. In aeronautics, this mismatch must be small because {FEM}s are a fundamental part of the development of an aircraft and of…
From the pragmatic to the symbolic, textiles play a prominent role in some of the most demanding yet ubiquitous scenarios, such as covering the complex and dynamic geometries of the human body. Textiles are made by repeated manipulations of…
Machine learning models of vastly different modalities and architectures are being trained to predict the behavior of molecules, materials, and proteins. However, it remains unclear whether they learn similar internal representations of…
Fourier solvers have become efficient tools to establish structure-property relations in heterogeneous materials. Introduced as an alternative to the Finite Element (FE) method, they are based on fixed-point solutions of the…
Task-driven design of soft robots requires models that are physically accurate and computationally efficient, while remaining transferable across actuator designs and task scenarios. However, existing modeling approaches typically face a…
In the analysis of composite materials with heterogeneous microstructures, full resolution of the heterogeneities using classical numerical approaches can be computationally prohibitive. This paper presents a micromechanics-enhanced finite…
Soft materials consist of basic units that are significantly larger than an atom but much smaller than the overall dimensions of the sample. The label "soft condensed matter" emphasizes that the large basic building blocks of these…
Superhard materials with good fracture toughness have found wide industrial applications, which necessitates the development of accurate hardness and fracture toughness models for efficient materials design. Although several macroscopic…
The optimal design of nanoparticle synthesis protocols is often achieved via one-at-a-time experimental designs. Aside from covering a limited space for the possible input conditions, these methods neglect possible interaction between…
Acoustic metamaterials offer exceptional control over wave propagation, but their potential remains unfulfilled due to fabrication constraints. Conventional processes yield mostly rigid, planar structures, whereas soft-matter alternatives…
Nonlinear metamaterials with tailored mechanical properties have applications in engineering, medicine, robotics, and beyond. While modeling their macromechanical behavior is challenging in itself, finding structure parameters that lead to…