Artificial intelligence-enabled smart mechanical metamaterials: advent and future trends

Mechanical metamaterials have opened an exciting venue for control and manipulation of architected structures in recent years. Research in the area of mechanical metamaterials has covered many of their fabrication, mechanism characterisation and application aspects. More recently, however, a paradigm shift has emerged to an exciting research direction towards designing, optimising and characterising mechanical metamaterials using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. This new line of research aims at addressing the difficulties in mechanical metamaterials (i.e. design, analysis, fabrication and industrial application). This review article discusses the advent and development of mechanical metamaterials, and the future trends of applying AI to obtain smart mechanical metamaterials with programmable mechanical response. We explain why architected materials and structures have prominent advantages, what are the main challenges in the mechanical metamaterial research domain, and how to surpass the limit of mechanical metamaterials via the AI techniques. We finally envision the potential research avenues and emerging trends for using the AI-enabled mechanical metamaterials for future innovations.