Soft grippers are ideal for grasping delicate, deformable objects with complex geometries. Universal soft grippers have proven effective for grasping common objects, however complex objects or environments require bespoke gripper designs. Multi-material printing presents a vast design-space which, when coupled with an expressive computational design algorithm, can produce numerous, novel, high-performance soft grippers. Finding high-performing designs in challenging design spaces requires tools that combine rapid iteration, simulation accuracy, and fine-grained optimization across a range of gripper designs to maximize performance, no current tools meet all these criteria. Herein, a diversity-based soft gripper design framework combining generative design and topology optimization (TO) are presented. Compositional pattern-producing networks (CPPNs) seed a diverse set of initial material distributions for the fine-grained TO. Focusing on vacuum-driven multi-material soft grippers, several grasping modes (e.g. pinching, scooping) emerging without explicit prompting are demonstrated. Extensive automated experimentation with printed multi-material grippers confirms optimized candidates exceed the grasp strength of comparable commercial designs. Grip strength, durability, and robustness is evaluated across 15,170 grasps. The combination of fine-grained generative design, diversity-based design processes, high-fidelity simulation, and automated experimental evaluation represents a new paradigm for bespoke soft gripper design which is generalizable across numerous design domains, tasks, and environments.

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To evaluate the effectiveness of maintenance treatments for asphalt pavement, four types of treatments, including the hot in-place recycling (HIR), milling and resurfacing (M&F), thin HMA overlay (THO) and microsurfacing (MS), were analyzed. 8 highway segments, in total 491.74 km, in Jiangsu Province in China, were investigated and the data of rutting depth (RD) in their maintenance history was collected. Based on the data of RD, the effectiveness of four treatments was quantitatively compared by three indicators, namely, performance jump (PJ), deterioration rate reduction (DRR) and average deterioration reduction rate (ADRR). Moreover, the applicability of the proposed effectiveness analyses was assessed by laboratory rutting tests with field cylindrical samples. Results indicate that the HIR is the most effective treatment, followed by M&F and THO. While the MS is the least effective treatment, whose service life is only three or four years. The findings highlight the significance of the proper traffic opening time after maintenance to avoid the weakened rutting resistance caused by high-temperature mixtures, the effect of the RD before maintenance on maintenance decision-making, and the application of high-quality RAP in the timely maintenance activities. Therefore, the performance-based maintenance strategy should be establish to improve pavement performance and extend pavement service life. Further research on the pavement performance after RAP application is necessary.

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Various physical interfacial phenomena occur during the process of welding and influence the final properties of welded structures. As the features of such interfaces depend on physics that resolve at different spatial scales, a multiscale and multiphysics numerical modeling approach is necessary. In a collaborative research project Modeling of Interface Evolution in Advanced Welding, a novel strategy of model linking is employed in a multiscale, multiphysics computational framework for fusion welding. We only directly link numerical models that are on neighboring spatial scales instead of trying to link all submodels directly together through all available spatial scales. This strategy ensures that the numerical models assist one another via smooth data transfer, avoiding the huge difficulty raised by forcing models to attempt communication over many spatial scales. Experimental activities contribute to the modeling work by providing valuable input parameters and validation data. Representative examples of the results of modeling, linking and characterization are presented.@en