Towards mechanically intelligent machines

Tradi?onal, rigid-bodied robots are extensively employed in manufacturing, excelling in the efficient execu?on of specific programmed tasks. However, their adaptability is o?en limited. When engaging with unstructured environments autonomously, these robots face challenges, typically requiring an array of sensors and actuators. Nevertheless, recent advancements highlight the integra?on of physical intelligence into robot structures, enabling autonomous responses to environmental cues with fewer sensors, actuators, and controllers.

Here, we embrace large deforma?ons, instabili?es and mul?stability as paradigms to expand the func?onality of robots. In the first part of this seminar, I will describe how instabili?es can be exploited to generate complex and reprogrammable deforma?ons out of uniform cylindrical shells. Shi?ing focus in the second part, I will discuss underactuated mul?stable linkages capable of execu?ng reprogrammable sequences of mo?on with just a single input.

Ka?a Bertoldi is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She earned master degrees from Trento University (Italy) in 2002 and from Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) in 2003, majoring in Structural Engineering Mechanics. Upon earning a Ph.D. degree in Mechanics of Materials and Structures from Trento University, in 2006, Ka?a joined as a PostDoc the group of Mary Boyce at MIT. In 2008 she moved to the University of Twente (the Netherlands) where she was an Assistant Professor in the faculty of Engineering Technology. In January 2010 Ka?a joined the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and established a group studying the mechanics of materials and structures. She is the recipient of the NSF Career Award 2011 and of the ASME's 2014 Hughes Young Inves?gator Award. She serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Extreme Mechanics Leters. She published over 120 peer-reviewed papers and several patents. Dr Bertoldi's research contributes to the design of materials with a carefully designed meso-structure that leads to novel effec?ve behavior at the macroscale. She inves?gates both mechanical and acous?c proper?es of such structured materials, with a par?cular focus on harnessing instabili?es and strong geometric non-lineari?es to generate new modes of func?onality. Since the proper?es of the designed architected materials are primarily governed by the geometry of the structure (as opposed to cons?tu?ve ingredients at the material level), the principles she discovers are universal and can be applied to systems over a wide range of length scales.