Elements: Elastica - A software ecosystem for modeling, simulation, design, and control of soft, compliant, and heterogenous structures interacting with their environment

This Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) project seeks to establish Elastica as a best-in-class, open source, and ready-to-use ecosystem for the simulation, analysis, design, and control of complex structures made of elastic, slender elements. The goal is to enable researchers to make inroads in three knowledge gaps identified as foundational and of national strategic importance: (1) scarcity of rigorous modeling and engineering design methods for continuum, compliant and configurable structures, devices and robots; (2) paucity of control methods able to effectively coordinate the virtually infinite degrees of freedom that characterize these distributed systems; (3) lack of models and design methods specialized to biomaterials to be incorporated in living biological machines, connecting full circle to the first point.

This project will result in a versatile computing framework that tackles a unique set of problems at the intersection of biology, robotics and control, thus increasing competitiveness in manufacturing via advanced computational methods. This effort is complemented by a strong outreach component. Indeed, applications of Elastica to animal locomotion and biological robots have great potential to capture the imagination of a broad, especially younger audience.

By highlighting the natural world connection, curiosity and creativity will be fostered, drawing attention to math, physics, biology and advanced computing. Particularly, the paper2tree project that involves local, underrepresented communities in planting trees associated to scientific discoveries, will be leveraged to engage elementary-school students.

Within this context, this effort will augment Elastica’s modeling capabilities and solution methods, aiming at tens-of-teraflops to petaflops-grade simulations entailing millions of rods in complex environments. Concurrently, to maximize adoption and impact, a cyberinfrastructure ecosystem of pre/post processing tools and interfaces, organized in easily customizable pipelines, will be created.

A structured project plan focused on science, computing, and cyberinfrastructure innovation will deliver: (i) A scalable, versatile, and efficient Cosserat rod solver that incorporates a variety of material models and environmental interface conditions, and that can run on a range of computing architectures from desktops to heterogeneous computing clusters; (ii) Benchmarked and verified discipline-specific modules of prebuilt primitives relevant to address the identified knowledge gaps above; (iii) A suite of both pre/postprocessing tools to assist in setting up domain-specific workflows. Throughout, open science and users/developers support will be core, to accelerate adoption, foster impact and catalyze innovation.

This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation within the Directorate for Engineering.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.