To achieve real-world functionality, robots must have the ability to carry out decision-making computations. However, soft robots stretch and therefore need a solution other than rigid computers. Examples of embedding computing capacity into soft robots currently include appending rigid printed circuit boards (PCBs) to the robot, integrating soft logic gates, and exploiting material responses for material-embedded computation. Although promising, these approaches introduce limitations such as rigidity, tethers, or low logic gate density. The field of stretchable electronics has sought to solve these challenges, but a complete pipeline for direct integration of single-board computers, microcontrollers, and other complex circuitry into soft robots has remained elusive. We present a generalized method to translate any complex two-layer circuit into a soft, stretchable form. This enabled the creation of stretchable single-board microcontrollers (including Arduinos) and other commercial circuits (including Sparkfun circuits), without design simplifications. As demonstrations of the method's utility, we embed highly stretchable (>300% strain) Arduino Pro Minis into the bodies of multiple soft robots. This makes use of otherwise inert structural material, fulfilling the promise of the stretchable electronics field to integrate state-of-the-art computational power into robust, stretchable systems during active use.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent environmental pollutants with known toxicity and bioaccumulation issues. Their widespread industrial use and resistance to degradation have led to global environmental contamination and significant health concerns. While a minority of PFAS have been extensively studied, the toxicity of many PFAS remains poorly understood due to limited direct toxicological data. This study advances the predictive modeling of PFAS toxicity by combining semi-supervised graph convolutional networks (GCNs) with molecular descriptors and fingerprints. We propose a novel approach to enhance the prediction of PFAS binding affinities by isolating molecular fingerprints to construct graphs where then descriptors are set as the node features. This approach specifically captures the structural, physicochemical, and topological features of PFAS without overfitting due to an abundance of features. Unsupervised clustering then identifies representative compounds for detailed binding studies. Our results provide a more accurate ability to estimate PFAS hepatotoxicity to provide guidance in chemical discovery of new PFAS and the development of new safety regulations.

Machine learning (ML) has been applied in many facets of chemistry, and its use is rapidly growing. We argue in this perspective that despite this dramatic growth and impact, ML could be employed better and more extensively. Current work is still far from exhausting the potential of ML to advance theory and application in chemistry in terms of breadth, depth, and scale. In addition, the actual types of problems that ML could tackle, such as hypothesis generation or enabling internalized scientific understanding, are still areas of active research or open problems.

Domain-specific Named Entity Recognition (NER), whose goal is to recognize domain-specific entities and their categories, provides an important support for constructing domain knowledge graphs. Currently, deep learning-based methods are widely used and effective in NER tasks, but due to the reliance on large-scale labeled data. As a result, the scarcity of labeled data in a specific domain will limit its application.Therefore, many researches started to introduce few-shot methods and achieved some results. However, the entity structures in specific domains are often complex, and the current few-shot methods are difficult to adapt to NER tasks with complex features.Taking the Chinese coal chemical industry domain as an example,there exists a complex structure of multiple entities sharing a single entity, as well as multiple relationships for the same pair of entities, which affects the NER task under the sample less condition.In this paper, we propose a Large Language Models (LLMs)-based entity recognition framework LLM-DER for the domain-specific entity recognition problem in Chinese, which enriches the entity information by generating a list of relationships containing entity types through LLMs, and designing a plausibility and consistency evaluation method to remove misrecognized entities, which can effectively solve the complex structural entity recognition problem in a specific domain.The experimental results of this paper on the Resume dataset and the self-constructed coal chemical dataset Coal show that LLM-DER performs outstandingly in domain-specific entity recognition, not only outperforming the existing GPT-3.5-turbo baseline, but also exceeding the fully-supervised baseline, verifying its effectiveness in entity recognition.

In the realm of industrial manufacturing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasing role, from automating existing processes to aiding in the development of new materials and techniques. However, a significant challenge arises in smaller, experimental processes characterized by limited training data availability, questioning the possibility to train AI models in such small data contexts. In this work, we explore the potential of Transfer Learning to address this challenge, specifically investigating the minimum amount of data required to develop a functional AI model. For this purpose, we consider the use case of quality control of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) tape laying in aerospace manufacturing using optical sensors. We investigate the behavior of different open-source computer vision models with a continuous reduction of the training data. Our results show that the amount of data required to successfully train an AI model can be drastically reduced, and the use of smaller models does not necessarily lead to a loss of performance.

Numerical simulation is powerful to study nonlinear solid mechanics problems. However, mesh-based or particle-based numerical methods suffer from the common shortcoming of being time-consuming, particularly for complex problems with real-time analysis requirements. This study presents a clustering adaptive Gaussian process regression (CAG) method aiming for real-time prediction for nonlinear structural responses in solid mechanics. It is a data-driven machine learning method featuring a small sample size, high accuracy, and high efficiency, leveraging nonlinear structural response patterns. Similar to the traditional Gaussian process regression (GPR) method, it operates in offline and online stages. In the offline stage, an adaptive sample generation technique is introduced to cluster datasets into distinct patterns for demand-driven sample allocation. This ensures comprehensive coverage of the critical samples for the solution space of interest. In the online stage, following the divide-and-conquer strategy, a pre-prediction classification categorizes problems into predefined patterns sequentially predicted by the trained multi-pattern Gaussian process regressor. In addition, dimension reduction and restoration techniques are employed in the proposed method to enhance its efficiency. A set of problems involving material, geometric, and boundary condition nonlinearities is presented to demonstrate the CAG method's abilities. The proposed method can offer predictions within a second and attain high precision with only about 20 samples within the context of this study, outperforming the traditional GPR using uniformly distributed samples for error reductions ranging from 1 to 3 orders of magnitude. The CAG method is expected to offer a powerful tool for real-time prediction of nonlinear solid mechanical problems and shed light on the complex nonlinear structural response pattern.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge is leading the development of robots capable of mapping underground mines and tunnels up to 8km in length and identify objects and people. Developing these autonomous abilities paves the way for future planetary cave and surface exploration missions. The Co-STAR team, competing in this challenge, is developing a hybrid aerial-ground vehicle, known as the Rollocopter. The current design of this vehicle is a drone with wheels attached. This allows for the vehicle to roll, actuated by the propellers, and fly only when necessary, hence benefiting from the reduced power consumption of the ground mode and the enhanced mobility of the aerial mode. This thesis focuses on the development and increased robustness of the local planning architecture for the Rollocopter. The first development of thesis is a local planner capable of collision avoidance. The local planning node provides the basic functionality required for the vehicle to navigate autonomously. The next stage was augmenting this with the ability to plan more reliably without localisation. This was then integrated with a hybrid mobility mode capable of rolling and flying to exploit power and mobility benefits of the respective configurations. A traversability analysis algorithm as well as determining the terrain that the vehicle is able to traverse is in the late stages of development for informing the decisions of the hybrid planner. A simulator was developed to test the planning algorithms and improve the robustness of the vehicle to different environments. The results presented in this thesis are related to the mobility of the rollocopter and the range of environments that the vehicle is capable of traversing. Videos are included in which the vehicle successfully navigates through dust-ridden tunnels, horizontal mazes, and areas with rough terrain.

In this paper we present a new machine learning workflow with unsupervised learning techniques to identify domains within atomic force microscopy images obtained from polymer films. The goal of the workflow is to identify the spatial location of the two types of polymer domains with little to no manual intervention and calculate the domain size distributions which in turn can help qualify the phase separated state of the material as macrophase or microphase ordered or disordered domains. We briefly review existing approaches used in other fields, computer vision and signal processing that can be applicable for the above tasks that happen frequently in the field of polymer science and engineering. We then test these approaches from computer vision and signal processing on the AFM image dataset to identify the strengths and limitations of each of these approaches for our first task. For our first domain segmentation task, we found that the workflow using discrete Fourier transform or discrete cosine transform with variance statistics as the feature works the best. The popular ResNet50 deep learning approach from computer vision field exhibited relatively poorer performance in the domain segmentation task for our AFM images as compared to the DFT and DCT based workflows. For the second task, for each of 144 input AFM images, we then used an existing porespy python package to calculate the domain size distribution from the output of that image from DFT based workflow. The information and open source codes we share in this paper can serve as a guide for researchers in the polymer and soft materials fields who need ML modeling and workflows for automated analyses of AFM images from polymer samples that may have crystalline or amorphous domains, sharp or rough interfaces between domains, or micro or macrophase separated domains.

Machine learning models have been progressively used for predicting materials properties. These models can be built using pre-existing data and are useful for rapidly screening the physicochemical space of a material, which is astronomically large. However, ML models are inherently interpolative, and their efficacy for searching candidates outside a material's known range of property is unresolved. Moreover, the performance of an ML model is intricately connected to its learning strategy and the volume of training data. Here, we determine the relationship between the extrapolation ability of an ML model, the size and range of its training dataset, and its learning approach. We focus on a canonical problem of predicting the properties of a copolymer as a function of the sequence of its monomers. Tree search algorithms, which learn the similarity between polymer structures, are found to be inefficient for extrapolation. Conversely, the extrapolation capability of neural networks and XGBoost models, which attempt to learn the underlying functional correlation between the structure and property of polymers, show strong correlations with the volume and range of training data. These findings have important implications on ML-based new material development.

Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTSs) provide high-resolution tactile images crucial for robot in-hand manipulation. However, force sensing in VBTSs is underutilized due to the costly and time-intensive process of acquiring paired tactile images and force labels. In this study, we introduce a transferable force prediction model, TransForce, designed to leverage collected image-force paired data for new sensors under varying illumination colors and marker patterns while improving the accuracy of predicted forces, especially in the shear direction. Our model effectively achieves translation of tactile images from the source domain to the target domain, ensuring that the generated tactile images reflect the illumination colors and marker patterns of the new sensors while accurately aligning the elastomer deformation observed in existing sensors, which is beneficial to force prediction of new sensors. As such, a recurrent force prediction model trained with generated sequential tactile images and existing force labels is employed to estimate higher-accuracy forces for new sensors with lowest average errors of 0.69N (5.8\% in full work range) in $x$-axis, 0.70N (5.8\%) in $y$-axis, and 1.11N (6.9\%) in $z$-axis compared with models trained with single images. The experimental results also reveal that pure marker modality is more helpful than the RGB modality in improving the accuracy of force in the shear direction, while the RGB modality show better performance in the normal direction.