Related papers: Rigidity of generic random tensegrity structures

A wide range of disordered materials, from biological to geological assemblies, feature discrete elements undergoing large shape changes. How significant geometrical variations at the microscopic scale affect the response of the assembly,…

Future robots will navigate perilous, remote environments with resilience and autonomy. Researchers have proposed building robots with compliant bodies to enhance robustness, but this approach often sacrifices the autonomous capabilities…

The Marginally Rigid State is a candidate paradigm for what makes granular material a state of matter distinct from both liquid and solid. Coordination number is identified as a discriminating characteristic, and for rough-surfaced…

A (bar-and-joint) framework is a set of points in a normed space with a set of fixed distance constraints between them. Determining whether a framework is locally rigid - i.e. whether every other suitably close framework with the same…

Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid struts and elastic tendons, provide impact resistance, low mass, and adaptability to unstructured terrain. Their compliance and complex, coupled dynamics, however, present modeling and control…

A general force-perturbation-based criterion for solid instability is proposed, which can predict instability including crease without priori knowledge of instability configuration. The crease instability is analyzed in detail, we found…

Many biological materials consist of sparse networks of disordered fibres, embedded in a soft elastic matrix. The interplay between rigid and soft elements in such composite networks leads to mechanical properties that can go far beyond the…

Purpose: Six million people use crutches as mobile aids in the US. Rigid designs with no axial mobility limit sensory feedback and lead to secondary injury on the upper joints. Spring-loaded designs offer compliance but may compromise…

We show how rigidity emerges in experiments of sheared frictional granular materials by using generalizations of two methods for identifying rigid structures. Both approaches, the force-based dynamical matrix and the topology-based rigidity…

A two dimensional amorphous material is modeled as an assembly of mesoscopic elemental pieces coupled together to form an elastically coherent structure. Plasticity is introduced as the existence of different minima in the energy landscape…

Mechanical and elastic properties of materials are among the most fundamental quantities for many engineering and industrial applications. Here, we present a formulation that is efficient and accurate for calculating the elastic and bending…

This work presents a numerical investigation on the nonlinear wave dynamics of tensegrity beams in 1D, 2D and 3D arrangements. The simulation of impact loading on a chain of tensegrity prisms and lumped masses allows us to apply on a…

There is a surge of research interest in the field of tensegrity robotics. Robots developed under this paradigm provide many advantages and have distinguishing features in terms of structural compliance, dexterity, safety, and weight…

Small flexible fibers in a turbulent flow are found to be most of the time as straight as stiff rods. This is due to the cooperative action of flexural rigidity and fluid stretching. However, fibers might bend and buckle when they tumble…

We consider mechanics of composite materials in which thin inclusions are modeled by lower-dimensional manifolds. By successively applying the dimensional reduction to junctions and intersections within the material, a geometry of…

We present a survey of results concerning the use of inductive constructions to study the rigidity of frameworks. By inductive constructions we mean simple graph moves which can be shown to preserve the rigidity of the corresponding…

An account of the transversality conditions of variational problems gives rise to essential results in the analysis of different physical phenomena. This powerful and elegant approach has proven to be fruitful in a diversity of variational…

Complex networks have recently attracted much interest due to their prevalence in nature and our daily lives [1, 2]. A critical property of a network is its resilience to random breakdown and failure [3-6], typically studied as a…

Motivated by the increased interest in modeling nondissipative materials by constitutive relations more general than those from Cauchy elasticity, we initiate the study of a class of stretch-limited elastic strings: the string cannot be…

This work focuses on the bearing rigidity theory, namely the branch of knowledge investigating the structural properties necessary for multi-element systems to preserve the inter-units bearings when exposed to deformations. The original…