In biological materials, ensembles of cells autonomously work, in a highly concerted manner and responding to a broad range of stimuli, in order to obtain a target structure or function. Single cells can move, change their shape or mechanical properties, and send out/receive signals to/from neighboring cells to heal a wound or to differentiate between different tissue types. Crucially, in order to manifest such complex behavior, the material’s structural units must be active and adaptive. Activity implies that they can process available energy sources, typically in the form of nutrients, to carry out all their functions. Adaptation is then the key to enable switching and reconfiguring between those different functions in different conditions. Remarkably, in living materials this happens in a fully autonomous way, in other words, relying only on internal feedback mechanisms and communication schemes.
The objective of the proposed research is to take a robotics-inspired minimalistic approach to design, realize and study a new class of buliding blocks for active materials. They will, in addition to on-board energy conversion, present internal degrees of freedom, sensing-feedback schemes, and communication pathways toward the objective of creating microscale structural units for fully autonomous active materials.
This vision will enable a broad community of physicists, material scientists, chemists and engineers to develop synthetic micro-structured materials with a similar spectrum of capabilities as their biological counterparts. Their creation offers tantalizing opportunities for self-healing materials, autonomous micro/nanoscale assembly and actuation, smart delivery and transport, sensing and remediation.
