Damage Adaptation in Seconds for Architected Materials

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17394v1
• Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:11:34 GMT
• Title: Damage Adaptation in Seconds for Architected Materials
• Abstract summary: In this work we adapt to catastrophic damage in soft-actuated systems in under one minute.<n>Architected materials are well equipped for adaptation: actuator failure occurs gradually rather than acutely.<n>Our algorithm is able to adapt to cuts, burns, and actuator repairs, enabling simulation-free real-time adaptation.
• Score: 1.9980707252644898
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Adaptation to damages and in-situ physical repairs is essential for long-term robot autonomy, yet challenging outside of narrowly defined and well-anticipated bounds. In this work we proprioceptively adapt to catastrophic damage in soft-actuated systems in under one minute. Architected materials are well equipped for adaptation: actuator failure occurs gradually rather than acutely, and damage can be described in a low-dimensional, discrete coordinate space. Surprisingly, latent damage representations plus a simple yet robust ensemble method is sufficient for adapting to unseen damage in real-time. Moreover, we identify conditions under which exponential sample complexity collapses to linear sample complexity for learned representations of architected materials, a concrete advantage over rigid components or continuum soft mechanisms. We demonstrate LEAP, our method for adaptive proprioception, via a tracing task for a 6DoF soft wrist based on Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. Our algorithm is able to adapt to cuts, burns, and actuator repairs, enabling simulation-free real-time adaptation that is critical for realizing the promise of soft robots outside the lab. Videos and more information are available at https://murpheylab.github.io/leap.

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