Mechanical cognition across scales

Elastic structures span a broad range of properties, from extremely linear to higly nonlinear, deterministic to stochastic and om overdamped to ultracoherent. In spite of this richness, mechanics as an information-processing platform is still in its infancy. In this talk, I will review our recent work on mechanical information processing in structures ranging from centimeter scale soft robots to nanometer-sized micromechanical logic gates. Each of these scales is both a window to a different type of physics (viscoelasticity, cracks, geometric nonlinearity, stochastic thermodynamics), and an opportunity for different applications. However, on a fundamental level, these systems are described by equivalent equations and therefore amenable to similar design techniques. As highlight applications, I will discuss our soft robotic designs that execute graph search algorithms to find the exit of a maze, nananomechanical logic gates that approach thermodynamic limits, and a passive elastic structure that can distinguish between spoken commands.