Ing. Jiří Zemánek, Ph.D.

This topic aims to design and investigate control systems for structures built from digital materials. These are machines composed of discrete elements of various physical properties enabling heterogeneous reconfigurable systems. The research currently focuses on finding suitable basic building blocks, studying the resulting structures' mechanical properties, and designing modeling techniques and construction planning algorithms. This work will develop a control framework for digital material structures, which will achieve the required static and dynamic behavior of the assembly - reaching the target shape, trajectory tracking, vibration suppression, etc. The work will also address related aspects such as mathematical modeling for control (standard methods lead, due to high dimensionality, to inefficient or even unmanageable models), design optimization tools to achieve the required properties or development of novel actuation and sensing methods suitable for those systems. The work will demonstrate the proposed techniques not only on simulations but also on physical experimental systems.