Counting and Sequential Information Processing in Mechanical Metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper introduces mechanical metamaterials capable of counting cyclic drives and storing information in internal states, enabling applications in sensing, robotics, and information processing.

Contribution

It presents novel irreversible metamaterials that can count cycles, encode driving history, and respond selectively to specific sequences, advancing mechanical information processing.

Findings

Metamaterials can count mechanical cycles and store states.

Aperiodic designs encode order of driving magnitudes.

Lock and key metamaterials respond only to specific sequences.

Abstract

Materials with an irreversible response to cyclic driving exhibit an evolving internal state which, in principle, encodes information on the driving history. Here we realize irreversible metamaterials that count mechanical driving cycles and store the result into easily interpretable internal states. We extend these designs to aperiodic metamaterials which are sensitive to the order of different driving magnitudes, and realize 'lock and key' metamaterials that only reach a specific state for a given target driving sequence. Our strategy is robust, scalable and extendable, and opens new routes towards smart sensing, soft robotics and mechanical information processing.