Funded Projects

Robotic metamaterials are, in a sense, a machine made of machines. Individual robotic particles can coalesce as active matter, where the movements and forces applied by individual robotic particles result in intriguing emergent behaviors. Organizing microrobots into metamaterial structures, a new class of active matter, the robotic metamaterial, is formed. Microrobotic particles are the active cyber-physical building blocks, each with a limited capacity to locally sense, communicate, actuate, and compute. When ordered and organized into a robotic metamaterial, the emergent ability to sense, communicate, actuate, and compute of the global structure is profoundly different, both in terms of functionality and the extent to which it can be dynamically tuned. Incorporating microrobotic structures with computation into metamaterials opens unexplored avenues in wave dispersion, sensing, guidance, and mitigation arising from new paradigms to actively manipulate and sense the flow of signals and energy. Mixed-signal computing techniques, such as in-memory neuromorphic computing and analog/time-domain signal processing, can emerge as key enablers of incorporating high energy-efficiency local sensing and computing capabilities in the microrobotic particles. The objective of this proposal is to design individual cyber-physical components of microrobot particles for the emergent system-level robotic metamaterial ability to sense and control signal and energy flow.