• Researcher Jie Yin has designed a computer without electronic components, which processes data using mechanical cubes. The device has a host of possible applications in encryption, data storage and haptic feedback.
• An international team is developing an autonomous computing and mechanical actuation system inspired by sensitive plants like mimosa pudica, which could revolutionise soft robotics.
Imagine IoT devices that can be mechanically activated by environmental stimuli or perform complex calculations without any external power. These are just some of the functionalities highlighted by new research in mechanical computing, which is experiencing a renaissance and challenging the orthodox identification of computing with digital electronics.
At North Carolina State University, researcher Jie Yin has contributed to renewed interest in this field with an unprecedented proof of concept: a structure inspired by the Japanese paper-cutting art of kirigami that can store data and perform binary and even more complex calculations.
The researchers show how this functional response to stimuli can be reinterpreted with integrated mechanical computing to create intelligent soft machines without electronics.
A team of Swiss, Turkish, German and South Korean researchers has drawn inspiration from plants that close when touched, such as the Venus flytrap and mimosa pudica, to develop an autonomous mechanical computing system that will pave the way for new possibilities in soft robotics. In both of these plants, controlled movement is the mechanical outcome of biochemical operations in response to environmental mechanical stimuli. “This behaviour requires intelligent ‘computation’ involving responsiveness to time-stamped inputs (e.g., two consecutive mechanical stimulations of the same sensory hair) or sensitivity to intensity, implying that computational operations between non-electrical signals engage deeply in the formulation of intelligent ‘living machines’,” point out the researchers in their article entitled Integrated mechanical computing for autonomous soft machines . The researchers show how this functional response to stimuli can be reinterpreted with integrated mechanical computing to create intelligent soft machines without electronics.
Energy transfer
Mechanical computing allows for the creation of autonomous intelligent systems that can function without external power: “The design of computational responses in synthetic architected materials, termed ‘mechanical computing’, is of growing interest in intelligent matter and machines that perform tasks between non-electrical environmental signals, such as soft robots,” point out the researchers. When mechanical bits of any type are triggered, they release elastic potential energy that propagates in the form of mechanical transition waves and logic operations. To demonstrate the feasibility of such systems, the researchers presented integrated mechanical computing systems that can receive, transmit and compute mechanical information to actuate intelligent soft machine prototypes without any external energy supply, which, in this case, were inspired by the self-defence mechanism of mimosa pudica.
Computing with kirigami-inspired cubes
At North Carolina State University, researcher Jie Yin has developed a metastructure of plastic cubes and elastic tape. Each of these bistable elements (each cube) can be subjected to independent mechanical or magnetic actuation to create a pop-up display or to serve as binary units for various tasks such as information writing, erasing, reading, encryption, and mechanologic computing. That is to say that when pushed up or down, the 64 interconnected 1-centimetre cubes in the kirigami-inspired structure can efficiently represent different data. As Jie Yin points out, “These 64-cube computers can be used independently or connected to other 64-cube Kirigami computers for added complexity and storage capacity,” effectively allowing for endless possibilities.
Environmental sensors and mechanical haptic devices
“The idea is to use multidimensional cube structures that can be operated mechanically to compute and encode information, so as to eliminate the need for electronics. These could, for example, be used to create a new type of mechanical encryption,” explains the researcher. Each of the cubes can be programmed to move independently enabling these structures to take on an infinite variety of shapes. “We could also create a kind of mechanical screen to show pop-up images.” The researcher further believes that in combination with smart materials, computing metastructures like the one he has developed could feature in innovative environmental sensors that change their shape in response to external stimuli. Last but not least, “Mechanisms of this kind could also be used in haptic terminals to create sensations of touch and movement on certain surfaces.”
Picture: Example of multidimensional mechanical computing structure
Dr Jie Yin
