Dr. Lauren K. Stewart

Project Information

PI: Lauren Stewart

Students: Diwakar Singh

Summary

Over years the design of structures advanced with the availability of historical data and improvement of probabilistic methods. In these structural engineering design approaches, the initial problem constraints are governed by past influences. For example, earthquake-resilient structures are designed for loads based on historical ground motion data and wind loads are determined from past measurements of gusts. As climate change and other man-made events rapidly alter our environment, this work seeks to explore a new paradigm in which past influences are removed in order to drive innovation. The removal of the predetermined loading conditions will yield a structure that is not specifically designed for given hazards, but adaptable for any environment.

In natural world ants, termites, birds, fish, and other animals adaptively achieve collective goals by each agent instinctually controlling its state based on feedback from local neighbors. Even though local agents perform simple sensing and actions, the global behavior achieved is amazingly scalable and robust. This decentralized behavior has been recreated in physical robotic form with swarm intelligence. This has inspired the integration of robotics into structural engineering by replacing structural elements with decentralized robotic agents designed to respond to local stimuli such that the global structure remains stable under any environment perturbation. Because the load definitions become irrelevant, the work has applications into scenarios where the terrain and conditions are unknown, such as deep sea and unknown planetary environments as well as in reconfigurable structures where loading scenarios change constantly.

Media and Presentations

Diwakar Singh presents at EMI 2019. Link to Presentation