Animating Metamaterials using Non-Reciprocity

ongoing

Living materials such as cells, tissues and simple organisms are animate. They autonomously and adaptively navigate their environment and are resilient to damage. Can we take inspiration from Nature and create synthetic animate materials? This dream has now become tangible thanks to major progress in the field of mechanical metamaterials. Metamaterials are composites that exhibit exceptional properties by leveraging geometric effects within their architecture. For example, they exhibit on-demand shape-changes and guide waves unidirectionally. Such functionalities are extremely promising to achieve animacy: pairing unidirectional waves with shape-changes can power locomotion—a crucial aspect of animacy. Yet, the locomotion of such metamaterials remains poorly understood and we lack design principles for their design and control. Therefore, metamaterials cannot locomote in complex and unpredictable terrains. I propose to overcome these limitations by introducing a new class of shape-changing metamaterials that are non-reciprocal. I will add robotics to the metamaterials toolbox by using distributed sensors, actuators and feedback control to break mechanical reciprocity, viz. Newton’s third law. These non-reciprocal metamaterials are described by asymmetric matrices and tensors and display unidirectional patterns of shape-changes. I will harness these patterns to create three-dimensional metamaterials that can autonomously roll, crawl and jump, and that display optimal locomotion performances in complex and unpredictable terrains. Just as living materials have deeply integrated and distributed functions, metamaterials will achieve animacy by interweaving shape-changes and non-reciprocity. ANIMETA will blur the boundary between metamaterials and robotics, provide new insights into metamaterial design and pattern formation in a distinctive setting where reciprocity is broken and will bring about new concepts for a new generation of distributed robots.