A choreography of beams: synthesizing mechanical intelligence from elastic instabilities

Abstract

Elastic deformation can be used as a physical form of information. The two stable configurations of a buckled beam can encode and store binary information. If these information-bearing elements interact mechanically, information can also be transported and processed between them.

In this thesis, we first investigate how networks of these elements can be designed systematically. Designing such systems becomes increasingly difficult as the desired behavior becomes more complex, for example in a maze-navigating system. Inspired by design automation in digital electronics, we introduce a synthesis framework for automatically generating mass-spring networks from behavioral descriptions.

We then investigate how information processing can be realized experimentally in elastic structures, starting with transporting stored information. The stability that allows buckled beams to retain information also hinders changing and moving the information. We address this conflict by cyclically modulating the elastic elements. We temporarily destabilize selected states and experimentally realize directional, quantized transport of stored information using a topological boundary-ratchet mechanism.

To experimentally realize logic operations, we redesign the elastic elements and their interactions to make the system more robust. Using this platform, we experimentally demonstrate how mechanical information can be transported, inverted, copied into two paths, and combined through an OR operation.