K-State engineer receives Department of Defense grant to develop shape-changing structures
Friday, April 12, 2024
Raj Kumar Pal, assistant professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering at K-State, has received a U.S. Department of Defense grant to design shape-changing structures using reservoir computing, a type of machine learning. | Download this photo.
MANHATTAN — A Kansas State University engineer is designing building blocks for reconfigurable structures that can change shape from one configuration to another without human intervention.
Raj Kumar Pal, assistant professor in the Alan Levin Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, has received a more than $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense's Air Force Office of Scientific Research through the Young Investigator Program for his three-year project, "Reservoir Computing Metamaterials for Dynamically Reconfigurable Structures." The project aims to tackle the longstanding challenge of designing shape-changing structures that can autonomously adapt to their environments by utilizing a type of machine learning called reservoir computing.
"The structures we're designing have applications in diverse areas, such as space satellites and medical robots, where structures need to fold or unwrap in a predictable way without human intervention," Pal said. "Current approaches require complex actuators, can achieve only a limited set of configurations or are prone to reaching incorrect configurations. Our approach will draw upon ideas from reservoir computing and use dynamic, time-varying forces as a means to achieve shape change."
The project will also expose undergraduate and graduate students to cutting-edge research on designing shape-change structures while training them in high-speed imaging and multi-physics computations.
