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 @ JBI

Binding constraintMaterials

A surface that harvests energy and computes at the same time is a materials result before it is a computing one. Conversion efficiency and the density of computing elements per unit area trade against each other, and where that trade lands decides whether the surface pays twice or once. Find the point where it pays twice and every exposed panel on a machine becomes a resource.

One of eight, and only one of them is physics. How we read a frontier →