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The human mind effortlessly simulates the movements of objects governed by the laws of physics, such as a fluttering, or a waving flag under wind force, without understanding the underlying physics. This suggests that human cognition can…

Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…

Living organisms have mastered the dynamic control of internal stresses to perform an array of functions, such as change shape and locomote. State-of-the-art attempts to replicate this ability in synthetic materials are rudimentary in…

Differentiable physics simulation provides an avenue to tackle previously intractable challenges through gradient-based optimization, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of solving robotics-related problems. To apply differentiable…

Learning with physical systems is an emerging paradigm that seeks to harness the intrinsic nonlinear dynamics of physical substrates for learning. The impetus for a paradigm shift in how hardware is used for computational intelligence stems…

Elastohydrodynamic lubrication, or simply soft lubrication, refers to the motion of deformable objects near a boundary lubricated by a fluid, and is one of the key physical mechanisms to minimise friction and wear in natural and engineered…

Recent advances in metamaterials and fabrication techniques have revived interest in mechanical computing. Contrary to techniques relying on static deformations of buckling beams or origami-based lattices, the integration of wave scattering…

Living soft tissues appear to promote the development and maintenance of a preferred mechanical state within a defined tolerance around a so-called set-point. This phenomenon is often referred to as mechanical homeostasis. In contradiction…

We investigate the memory effects under oscillatory shear deformation of amorphous solids through computer simulations. Applications of shear deformations in all orthogonal directions show that encoded memories via this protocol are more…

Human reasoning involves recognising common underlying principles across many examples. The by-products of such reasoning are invariants that capture patterns such as "if someone went somewhere then they are there", expressed using…

To enable robots to develop human-like fine manipulation, it is essential to understand how mechanical compliance, multi-modal sensing, and purposeful interaction jointly shape tactile perception. In this study, we use a dedicated modular…

Replicating the computational functionalities and performances of the brain remains one of the biggest challenges for the future of information and communication technologies. Such an ambitious goal requires research efforts from the…

Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…

The human brain's plasticity allows for the integration of artificial body parts into the human body. Leveraging this, embodied systems realize intuitive interactions with the environment. We introduce a novel concept: embodied swarm…

Imagine sitting at your desk, looking at objects on it. You do not know their exact distances from your eye in meters, but you can immediately reach out and touch them. Instead of an externally defined unit, your sense of distance is tied…

Learning to perform activities through demonstration requires extracting meaningful information about the environment from observations. In this research, we investigate the challenge of planning high-level goal-oriented actions in a…

This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…

The study of elastic structures embedded with fluid-filled cavities received considerable attention in fields such as autonomous materials, sensors, actuators, and smart systems. This work studies an elastic beam embedded with a set of…

Protocol-dependent states in structural glasses can encode a disordered, yet retrievable memory. While training such materials is typically done via a global drive, such as external shear, in dense active matter the driving is instead local…

This study demonstrates that the soft biological tissues of humans can be used as a type of soft body in physical reservoir computing. Soft biological tissues possess characteristics such as stress-strain nonlinearity and viscoelasticity…