Related papers: Self-deployable contracting-cord metamaterials wit…
Metamaterials are arrangement of basic building blocks that repeat in space, time, or both. These material systems serve as an excellent platform for controlling waves, such as engineering wavenumber band gaps, flat bands, and…
Mechanical metamaterials can be designed to exhibit unique mechanical properties, including tunable auxetic behavior as well as multi-stability, which arise from the geometry and configuration of the constituent building blocks.…
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…
The mechanics of complex soft matter often cannot be understood in the classical physical frame of flexible polymers or rigid rods. The underlying constituents are semiflexible polymers, whose finite bending stiffness ($\kappa$) leads to…
Tunable metasurfaces enable active and on-demand control over optical wavefronts through reconfigurable scattering of resonant nanostructures. Here, we present novel insights inspired by mechanical metamaterials to achieve giant tunability…
Entangled matter displays unusual and attractive properties and mechanisms: tensile strength, capabilities for assembly and disassembly, damage tolerance. While some of the attributes and mechanisms share some traits with traditional…
This paper presents a novel, modular, cable-driven soft robotic arm featuring multi-segment reconfigurability. The proposed architecture enables a stackable system with independent segment control, allowing scalable adaptation to diverse…
Mechanical metamaterials have continued to offer unprecedented tunability in mechanical properties, but most designs to date have prioritized attaining high stiffness and strength while sacrificing deformability. The emergence of woven…
A major limitation of current acoustic metamaterials is that their acoustic properties are either locked into place once fabricated or only modestly tunable, tying them to the particular application for which they are designed. We present…
Metamaterials, i.e., artificially structured ("synthetic") media comprising weakly coupled discrete elements, exhibit extraordinary properties and they hold a great promise for novel applications including super-resolution imaging,…
Multi-stable mechanical structures find cutting-edge applications across various domains due to their reconfigurability, which offers innovative possibilities for engineering and technology advancements. This study explores the emergence of…
Animals run robustly in diverse terrain. This locomotion robustness is puzzling because axon conduction velocity is limited to a few ten meters per second. If reflex loops deliver sensory information with significant delays, one would…
A buckled sheet offers a reservoir of material that can be unfurled at a later time. For sufficiently thin yet stiff materials, this geometric process has a striking mechanical feature: when the slack runs out, the material locks to further…
Snapping beams enable rapid geometric transitions through nonlinear instability, offering an efficient means of generating motion in soft robotic systems. In this study, a tendon-driven mechanism consisting of spiral-based metabeams was…
Soft elastic composite materials containing particulate rigid inclusions in a soft elastic matrix are candidates for developing soft actuators or tunable damping devices. The possibility to reversibly drive the rigid inclusions within such…
We propose a novel approach for efficient tuning of the transmission characteristics of metamaterials through a continuous adjustment of the lattice structure, and confirm it experimentally in the microwave range. The concept is rather…
The structural complexity of metamaterials is limitless, although in practice, most designs comprise periodic architectures which lead to materials with spatially homogeneous features. More advanced tasks, arising in e.g. soft robotics,…
Nature provides examples of self-assemble lightweight disordered network structures with remarkable mechanical properties which are desirable for many applications purposes but challenging to reproduce artificially. Previous experimental…
The complex behavior of highly deformable mechanical metamaterials can substantially enhance the performance of soft robots.
We developed a new class of soft locomotive robots that can self-assemble into a preprogrammed configuration and vary their stiffness afterward in a highly integrated, compact body using contracting-cord particle jamming (CCPJ). We…