Mechanical signaling cascades

Abstract

Mechanical computing has seen resurgent interest recently owing to the potential to embed sensing and computation into new classes of programmable metamaterials. To realize this, however, one must push signals from one part of a device to another and do so in a way that can be reset robustly. We investigate the propagation of signals in a bistable mechanical cascade uphill in energy. By identifying a penetration length for perturbations, we show that signals can propagate uphill for finite distances and map out parameters for this to occur. Experiments on soft elastomers corroborate our results.