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

非技术摘要：想象一下，在徒步旅行中，你的手杖变成了一把椅子，如果你摔倒摔断了胳膊，椅子就变成了一个夹板。这种可任务的“超级材料”是stu&amp；#64256；这需要材料科学的巨大进步。这些材料不仅取决于组成元素的性质，还取决于控制它们的新兴动力学。可编程物质和群体机器人的研究越来越受欢迎，但主要是在工程师和计算机科学家的领域。物理学中大部分的活性物质研究都是在理论上进行的，往往不能充分地捕捉到现实世界中元素之间的物理相互作用，而这些相互作用可能会严重影响整体行为。提出的工作将集中在一个简单易用的框架上，通过活性颗粒材料（纠缠机器人）结合实验、模拟和理论，并探索分布式控制方案，通过该方案，这些材料可以感知、移动，并改变局部和全局的属性和形态。技术摘要：本项目将结合群体机器人技术和实验及软物质物理学的见解，重点研究纠缠机器人群体或“活跃颗粒物质”可以改变局部机械状态以产生全局紧急行为的物理原理；即物理相互作用主导机器人之间的显式协调。虽然活性物质物理学是一个充满活力的研究领域，但很少有控制良好的实验系统可以在受控的情况下测试理论进展，在受控的情况下，材料形状、密度和活性等参数可以快速变化，甚至更少将传感和反馈的作用纳入动力学。因此，为了在致密软物质物理中发现新的动力学，该项目涉及1)一个可扩展的颗粒机器人平台，拥有100+个人；2)用于分析和验证的理论和实验工具，如漏斗流、剪切单元和数值多物理场模拟；3)用于生成和转换紧急行为和材料特性（如运动、形态、孔隙率和屈服强度）的分布式算法。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.