Research topic

The surface that pays twice.

An embodied system that has to persist — fly for months, run for a Martian year, stay dark — is governed by a single inequality: harvest must meet demand, integrated over the mission. MMAST treats the vehicle's skin as the power plant and reads every gram against that ledger. The same multi-material stack that harvests also reshapes the signature: the radiative-cooling film that cools the cells is the IR-stealth layer; the metasurface that lifts photovoltaic gain is the radar-absorbing coat; the TENG skin that scavenges vibration is the distributed structural-health sensor. Every module pays back twice. It is one physics-informed solver over three orthogonal axes — vehicle archetype, medium, and surface module — so the same energy balance holds for a stratospheric glider, a subsea drone, and a Mars rover. The simulator is built on CadFuture, the lab's computable-world-model engine, runs headless for parameter sweeps, and renders through WebGPU.

physics-mmast-sim on GitHub ↗Each archetype balances its harvest stack against its demand stack; cross the break-even line and the vehicle is persistent. The fleet cycles: HALE solar UAV → cloud-carrier airship → subsea drone → Mars rover.

↓ Whitepaper · PDFRead online◆ Living paperTechnical Report TR-2026-14 · Institute for Physical AI @ BMI