Abstract
Recently, significant progress has been made in the field of flexible bulk metamaterials composed of soft and elastic materials, unlocking the potential for achieving programmable non-linear mechanical responses, such as shape morphing, energy absorption, and information processing. However, the majority of these metamaterials utilize expensive hyperelastic materials and require complex fabrication processes. Additionally, constructing eco-friendly stiff constituents for these metamaterials remains challenging due to their limited elastic limit strains (<0.1). Here, we propose a systematic design strategy by combining curved beams with chiral metastructures to generate a family of three-dimensional programmable resilient mechanical metamaterials without relying on flexible or hyperelastic constituents. These tiled metamaterials demonstrate robust, anisotropic and non-linear resilience under large elastic compression strains (>0.75), while exhibiting a programmable effective modulus reduction of nearly 6 orders of magnitude compared to the native stiff components. Furthermore, leveraging their stable resilience under high-frequency stimuli, we successfully developed a meter-scale soft robot capable of traversing complex narrow scenarios on demand without the need for flexible materials or sophisticated pipelines. We anticipate that these mechanical metamaterials could serve as a universal platform for programmable active dampers, modular flexible robots, and medical rehabilitation equipment at various scales.
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