Mechanical intelligence via fully reconfigurable elastic neuromorphic metasurfaces

The ability of mechanical systems to perform basic computations has gained traction over recent years, providing an unconventional alternative to digital computing in off grid, low power, and severe environments, which render the majority of electronic components inoperable. However, much of the work in mechanical computing has focused on logic operations via quasi-static prescribed displacements in origami, bistable, and soft deformable matter. Here, we present a first attempt to describe the fundamental framework of an elastic neuromorphic metasurface that performs distinct classification tasks, providing a new set of challenges, given the complex nature of elastic waves with respect to scattering and manipulation. Multiple layers of reconfigurable waveguides are phase-trained via constant weights and trainable activation functions in a manner that enables the resultant wave scattering at the readout location to focus on the correct class within the detection plane. We further demonstrate the neuromorphic system’s reconfigurability in performing two distinct tasks, eliminating the need for costly remanufacturing.