EAGER: Collaborative Research: Creation of Active Granular Materials and Study of Emergent Properties

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Non-Technical Abstract:Imagine on a hike that on command your walking stick becomes a chair, and should you fall and break your arm, the chair becomes a splint. Such taskable "super-materials" are the stuff of science fiction and will require drastic advances in material science. Such materials will depend not only on the properties of constituent elements, but also the emergent dynamics governing them. Research in programmable matter and swarm robotics is increasingly popular, but has largely been in the domain of engineers and computer scientists. The bulk of active matter studies in physics have been conducted theoretically, and often fails to adequately capture real-world physical interactions between elements which may critically influence the overall behavior. The proposed work will focus on a simple and accessible framework combining experiments, simulations, and theory via active granular materials (entangled robots), and explore distributed control schemes by which such materials can sense, locomote, and change properties and morphologies both locally and globally. Technical Abstract:Combining insights from swarm robotics and experimental and soft matter physics, this project will focus on the physics principles by which entangled robot swarms, or "active granular matter", can alter local mechanical states to produce global emergent behaviors; i.e. where the physical interactions dominate explicit coordination between robots. While active matter physics is a vibrant area of research, there are few well-controlled experimental systems in which theoretical advances can be tested in controlled situations, where parameters like material shape, density, and activity can be rapidly varied, and even fewer that incorporate the role of sensing and feedback into the dynamics. Therefore, to enable discovery of new dynamics in dense soft matter physics this project involves 1) a scalable, granular robotics platform with 100+ individuals; 2) theoretical and experimental tools for analysis and validation, such as hopper flows, shear cells, and numerical multi-physics simulations; and 3) distributed algorithms for producing and transitioning between emergent behaviors and material properties such as motion, morphology, porosity, and yield strength.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.