Damage Adaptation in Seconds for Architected Materials

Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2026, Sydney, Australia

*Equal Contribution. 1Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University

Rapid Adaptation to Cuts, Burns, and Repairs

Our method can adapt to actuator cuts, burns, and repairs. In-situ actuator repairs are fully out-of-distribution.

Architected materials provide guarantees for adaptation without simulation and with low sample complexity, requiring a minimal amount of hardware experiments for pretraining.

Abstract

Adaptation to damages and in-situ physical repairs 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.

Blind, Proprioception-Only Tracing

Undamaged

2 Cuts, 1 Burn: Unadapted

After LEAP Adaptation

The goal of the task is to use proprioception alone to trace a target contour. After damage occurs, LEAP is able to adapt and recover up to 100% of the original performance.

We introduce a 6-DoF soft wrist to utilize LEAP, which enables contact-rich, dexterous tasks.

Video (with narration)