TP 9: Autonomous and reconfigurable metamaterials and soft robots
Principal Investigator: Andreas Walther
At present soft robotics devices and metamaterials are mostly following concepts of continuum mechanics with little detail to what advanced chemical manipulations in the context of feedback-controlled chemistry or chemical reaction networks could provide. It is the aim of this project to establish concepts for autonomous devices, for metamaterials that can reconfigure their behavior according to outside parameters other than mechanical deformation, and for implementing feedback routines operating during mechanical deformation. As such it will build a bridge between reaction networks of a chemical nature and reaction networks of a structural nature, and thereby provide adaptive and interactive behavior for soft robotics and metamaterials.