Abstract
Fiber-based organization of matter is pervasive in nature and engineering, in active and passive settings, and across scales, from muscles, tendons and bones that make up full organisms to polymers, composite materials, and soft robots. Here a modeling approach based on assemblies of Cosserat rods is presented to tackle fibrous systems that are distributed, heterogeneous, and hierarchically organized. Scalability, robustness, and utility of our simulation methods are then demonstrated for the design, realization and control of soft living creatures, bio-hybrid machines, and metamaterials.
About the Speaker
Mattia Gazzola is an Associate Professor in the Mechanical Science and Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He joined UIUC in Fall 2016 after a postdoc at Harvard and PhD at ETH Zurich. His work lies at the interface between numerics, mechanics, robotics, biology, and computing. His studies were awarded with the ETH Medal, Early and Advanced Swiss National Science Foundation Fellowships, NSF CAREER, and featured on the cover of several scientific journals including Science, Nature, PNAS, PRL. He is the Lead PI and co-director of the center-scale NSF Expedition "Mind in Vitro – Computing with Living Neurons".
Host: Professor Leonardo Chamorro