Aerospace Colloquium

Advanced fabrication and manufacturing are expanding the design space for multi-scale features and intricate three-dimensional architectures. Yet, the direct co-fabrication of structural, dielectric, conductive, and active media remains a core challenge—particularly for systems that must sense, actuate, and adapt to electrical, acoustic, or mechanical stimuli. Unlike biological tissues, which intrinsically integrate sensing, actuation, and control, synthetic materials rarely achieve comparable system-level functionality.

In this talk, I will present new multi-material additive manufacturing strategies that enable high-speed, compositionally precise assembly of diverse material classes within 3D architectures. These approaches access behaviors beyond conventional constitutive limits, including symmetry-breaking piezoelectric effects, electro-acoustic coupling, and new toughening mechanisms that emerge only in multi-material form.

The resulting "intelligent solids" embed sensing, actuation, and signal transduction directly into their structure. I will highlight their application in robotic tactile sensing, autonomous path finding, and real-time texture recognition at the scale of a human fingertip. This platform offers near-neural-terminal resolution in recording and transmitting distributed tactile information for robotic grippers, surgical tools, wearable interfaces, and remote systems. These engineered materials localize contact, measure three-axis forces, and generate programmable haptic responses—functioning as artificial mechanoreceptors and pointing toward a new class of embodied, adaptive matter.