This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) provides $337,865 to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (doing business as Virginia Tech) to conduct foundational research on creating transformative structures and materials with "multi-faceted intelligence" in the mechanical domain, also known as "mechano-intelligence." The key objectives are to: 1) explore the complexity and sophistication of mechano-intelligence, 2) develop performance metrics to quantify mechano-intelligence, 3) correlate mechanical design to intelligence performance, and 4) create a systematic design method for integrating mechano-intelligence with engineering functions. The research aims to harness the physical "reservoir computing" power of origami structures as a mechanical neural network to enable intelligent engineering systems that can autonomously sense, memorize, and act on environmental information, with potential applications across industries. This 3-year award from September 2024 to August 2027 supports this collaborative research effort to advance the foundational science and engineering for distributed intelligence embodied in physical structures.
Generated 3/4/25, 6:27 AM