Autonomous Repairing Protocol for Metastructures – ASAP-E

Metastructures has attracted significant interest across various engineering domains, for example acoustic metasurface for noise emission control, or beam-like structures for energy harvesting. However, as these metastructures transition into practical engineering applications, there is a need to equip them with robust capabilities to diagnostic, resist and recover from failures or damage. A significant challenge arises when there is a risk of cascading performance degradation of the entire metastructure due to failure/damage in a single cell. Surprisingly, this domain remains unexplored in the existing literature. Therefore, ASAP-E project's objective is to develop an autonomous repairing protocol focusing on dynamic systems with active control, providing these complex and difficult-to-maintain metastructures with the ability to sense their state in real time and manage actions to repair their functionality to the moment before the presence of faults (e.g., cell loses its sensor hampering actuation) or damages (e.g., cell breakdown). From a top-down perspective, the levels which ASAP-E target to solve are the following: (1) establishing an effective communication strategy between cells, encompassing a distributed control architecture; (2) the detection and localization of faulty or damaged cells within a structural health monitoring (SHM) context; (3) determining appropriate decision-making processes to reconfigure cells to give the metastructure back its performance. By solving them, ASAP-E project aims to pioneer a groundbreaking research subject that remains unexplored. Two primary sources of originality define the project: the adoption of a distributed control architecture (relatively unexplored within metastructures), chosen for its relevance in dynamic environments, and the integration of new data-driven machine learning algorithms into the SHM context for decision-making process.