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Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…
Fibre jamming is a relatively new and understudied soft robotic mechanism that has previously found success when used in stiffness-tuneable arms and fingers. However, to date researchers have not fully taken advantage of the freedom offered…
Granular jamming has been identified as a fundamental mechanism for the operation of robotic grippers. In this work, we show, that soft particles like expanded polystyrene beads lead to significantly larger gripping forces in comparison to…
The shear response of soft solids can be modeled with linear elasticity, provided the forcing is slow and weak. Both of these approximations must break down when the material loses rigidity, such as in foams and emulsions at their…
Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…
The application of granular jamming in soft robotics is a recent and promising new technology offer exciting possibilities for creating higher performance robotic devices. Granular jamming is achieved via the application of a vacuum…
The connection between friction and jamming in granular media, molecular glasses, and complex fluids is explored. The paper first reviews the way friction is measured, the types of results that are observed, and what is known about the…
Jamming is a common feature of out of equilibrium systems showing slow relaxation dynamics. Here we review our efforts in understanding jamming in granular materials using experiments and computer simulations. We first obtain an estimation…
A numerical study on the elastic response of single- and multi-layer systems formed by alternating pentamode lattices and stiffening plates is presented. Finite element simulations are conducted to analyze the dependence of the effective…
Athermal packings of soft repulsive spheres exhibit a sharp jamming transition in the thermodynamic limit. Upon further compression, various structural and mechanical properties display clean power-law behavior over many decades in…
The role of fixed degrees of freedom in soft/granular matter systems has broad applicability and theoretical interest. Here we address questions of the geometrical role that a scaffolding of fixed particles plays in tuning the threshold…
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…
We use molecular simulations to study jamming of a crumpled bead-spring model polymer in a finite container and compare to jamming of repulsive spheres. After proper constraint counting, the onset of rigidity is seen to occur isostatically…
During development and under normal physiological conditions, biological tissues are continuously subjected to substantial mechanical stresses. In response to large deformations cells in a tissue must undergo multicellular rearrangements in…
We study the mechanical stiffening behavior in two-dimensional (2D) cross-linked networks of semiflexible biopolymer filaments under simple shear. Filamental constituents immersed in a fluid undergo thermally excited bending motions.…
Granular systems are not always homogeneous and can be composed of grains with very different mechanical properties. To improve our understanding of the behavior of real granular systems, in this experimental study, we compress 2D…
Cohesive zone models do not consider the lateral contraction of adhesive layers under tensile loads. The constraint of the lateral contraction by the adherents which depends on the geometry of the adhesive layer has a major influence on the…
Various disordered dense systems such as foams, gels, emulsions and colloidal suspensions, exhibit a jamming transition from a liquid state (they flow) to a solid state below a yield stress. Their structure, thoroughly studied with powerful…
Active control of the shape of soft robots is challenging. Despite having an infinite number of passive degrees of freedom (DOFs), soft robots typically only have a few actively controllable DOFs, limited by the number of degrees of…
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),…