Shape Morphing Mechanical Metamaterials for Soft Machines

Biological organisms are rich with the ability to reconfigure their shape and properties to perform diverse tasks. These capabilities are inspiring emerging soft robots that have the potential to display biological capabilities through advanced machine intelligence. However, soft machines struggle to achieve multiple complex configurations, quickly lock into shape to support loads, and go between multiple states reversibly. In this presentation we will introduce a multifunctional shape morphing material with reversible, rapid, and lockable polymorphic reconfigurability. We couple elastomeric kirigami with an unconventional reversible plasticity mechanism in metal alloys to rapidly (< 0.1 s) lock-in complex, load bearing shapes, with reversibility and self-healing through phase-change. Large deformations and complex morphologies are demonstrated where we show the ability to exhibit positive, zero, and negative Gaussian curvatures and conformally wrap complex surfaces. This approach overcomes trade-offs in deformability and load bearing capacity while eliminating power requirements to lock in shapes. This combination of properties is enabling for creating multifunctional soft robots. We demonstrate this material through integration with onboard control, motors, and power, to create a soft robotic morphing drone which autonomously transforms from a ground to air vehicle and an underwater morphing machine which can be reversibly deployed to collect cargo.