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Natural organisms have evolved integrated Latch-Mediated Spring Actuation systems (LaMSA) that consist of multiple latches and springs to enhance power output and adapt to diverse environmental conditions. Similar designs are appealing yet…
Many small animals, particularly insects, use power-amplification to generate rapid motions, such as jumping, that would otherwise be impossible given the standard power density of muscle. A common framework for understanding this power…
In nature, different species of smaller animals produce ultra-fast movements to aid in their locomotion or protect themselves against predators. These ultra-fast impulsive motions are possible, as often times, there exist a small latch in…
Soft sleeve actuators (SSAs) have recently been developed as a pneumatic actuation approach for wearable and assistive robotic systems. By integrating the actuation structure into a sleeve-like geometry, these actuators can reduce reliance…
We study an extreme active matter system, which is essentially a dense assembly of athermal, soft and infinitely persistent active particles. Using extensive numerical simulations we obtain jammed configurations of this system in two…
Soft robots have immense potential given their inherent safety and adaptability, but challenges in soft actuator forces and design constraints have limited scaling up soft robots to larger sizes. Electrothermal shape memory alloy (SMA)…
The stiffness modulation mechanism for soft robotics has gained considerable attention to improve deformability, controllability, and stability. However, for the existing stiffness soft actuator, high lateral stiffness and a wide range of…
Active nematics are out-of-equilibrium systems in which energy injection at the microscale drives emergent collective behaviors, from spontaneous flows to active turbulence. While the dynamics of these systems have been extensively studied,…
Active networks made of biopolymers and motor proteins are valuable bioinspired systems that have been used in the last decades to study the cytoskeleton and its self-organization under mechanical stimulation. Different techniques are…
Snapping instabilities in soft structures offer a powerful pathway to achieve rapid and energy-efficient actuation. In this study, an eccentric dome-shaped snapping actuator is developed to generate controllable asymmetric motion through…
A model of damped lyman alpha systems is presented based on randomly moving clouds in spherical halos. We use the Press-Schechter model for the abundance of halos, and assume that each halo has a similar population of clouds, with total…
Architected materials that exploit buckling instabilities to reversibly trap energy have been shown to be effective for impact protection. The energy-absorbing capabilities of these architected materials can be enhanced further by…
Modulating the stiffness of soft actuators is crucial for improving the efficiency of interaction with the environment. However, current stiffness modulation mechanisms are hard to achieve high lateral stiffness and a wide range of bending…
The legged robots with variable stiffness actuators (VSAs) can achieve energy-efficient and versatile locomotion. However, equipping legged robots with VSAs in real-world application is usually restricted by (i) the redundant mechanical…
Aging populations and the rising prevalence of neurological and musculoskeletal disorders increase the demand for wearable mobility assistive devices that are effective, comfortable, and anatomically compatible. Many existing systems use…
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…
Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
We investigate the properties of Damped Lyman-alpha systems (DLAs) using high-resolution and large box-size cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of a LambdaCDM model. The numerical code used is a modification of GADGET-2 with a self…
We investigate the shear elastic modulus of soft polymer foams loaded with hard spherical particles and we show that, for constant bubble size and gas volume fraction, strengthening is strongly dependent on the size of those inclusions.…