Programmable mechanical devices through magnetically tunable bistable elements

Mechanical instabilities, especially in the form of bistable and multistable mechanisms, have recently garnered a lot of interest as a mode of improving the capabilities and increasing the functionalities of soft robots, structures, and soft mechanical systems in general. Although bistable mechanisms have shown high tunability through the variation of their material and design variables, they lack the option of modifying their attributes dynamically during operation. Here, we propose a facile approach to overcome this limitation by dispersing magnetically active microparticles throughout the structure of bistable elements and using an external magnetic field to tune their responses. We experimentally demonstrate and numerically verify the predictable and deterministic control of the response of different types of bistable elements under varying magnetic fields. Additionally, we show how this approach can be used to induce bistability in intrinsically monostable structures simply by placing them in a controlled magnetic field. Furthermore, we show the application of this strategy in precisely controlling the features (e.g., velocity and direction) of transition waves propagating in a multistable lattice created by cascading a chain of individual bistable elements. Moreover, we can implement active elements like a transistor (gate controlled by magnetic fields) or magnetically reconfigurable functional elements like binary logic gates for processing mechanical signals. This strategy serves to provide programming and tuning capabilities required to allow more extensive utilization of mechanical instabilities in soft systems with potential functions such as soft robotic locomotion, sensing and triggering elements, mechanical computation, and reconfigurable devices.