Multistable structures with collocated sensing and mechanologic

We present a class of multistable metastructures that display history-dependent deformation. Mechanical computation has been explored drawing analogies with logic gates. Most examples in the literature have demonstrated how deformations can be interpreted as logic gates to perform logic operations. However, the idea of converting deformation from mechanical inputs that vary in space and time into a single morphological output has not been demonstrated. We show that path-dependence in multistable metastructures allows for sensing environmental inputs, while the resulting deformation allows for processing information useful for taking decisions. These metastructures are capable of storing memory and conducting computation using the result of a sequence of steps on a single purely elastic substrate. Previous examples of mechanologic have relied on bookkeeping on an external device, thus separating the computation unit from the memory unit. In contrast, our mechanologic metamaterials depart from von Neumann-like architecture for mechanical computation, rather showing a type of in-memory material morphologic akin to neuromorphic computation architectures.