Integrated mechanologics for autonomous soft machines

Many biological organisms possess the capability to interact with and respond intelligently to environmental stimuli without a central computing system. This is in stark contrast to our modern electrical systems where the "intelligence" is concentrated in a central system and all input and output signals need to be converted to or from electrical signals. Building upon previous works of mechanical signal transmission systems (through transition waves) and mechanical binary computation, we present a strategy for building an unconventional class of mechanical computational intelligence, which provides a seamless interface with mechanical environments for autonomous soft machines. We show that the architected design of soft bistable elements can form into a monolithic computational platform where nondispersive elastic solitary waves propagate through networked mechanical computing units. A systematic understanding of the behavior of the solitary waves allows us to establish a general design rule for integrated mechanical computing, and its effectiveness is verified both numerically and experimentally. As a demonstration of the capability of this design strategy, we show a mimosa-inspired soft machine, which reacts differentially to mechanical inputs of varying strengths to consecutively actuate its synthetic "leaves" in different patterns. These findings would pave the way for future intelligent robots and machines that perform operations between non-electrical environmental agents.