Inter materials and structures mechanoperception for self learning
- Principal Investigator (PI): Alberto Corigliano
- Host institution: Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy
- Proposal duration: 60 months
IMMENSE aims to create materials and structures capable of sensing, exchanging, interpreting and comparing signals. This will be a major step toward the design of sentient materials and structures capable of self-learning and self-adaptation.
Forests, insect swarms, and bones during remodeling are striking examples of biological systems whose elements can sense and exchange signals. These signals enable adaptation to changing environmental conditions and, in some cases, performance improvement without centralized control.
Can materials and structures be given similar capabilities? How can devices exchange information through mechanistic processes and use it to respond optimally to external stimuli? To what extent can materials and structures be endowed with active inference mechanisms that mimic brain-like functions?
IMMENSE will combine solid and structural mechanics, solid-fluid interaction, smart architected metamaterials, and multi-physics phenomena across micro- and macroscales to implement sensing and signal-processing abilities on a mechanistic basis. The complex dynamics of oscillator arrays, coupled with physical “in materia” computing that reproduces classification and learning processes, will provide innovative tools for enabling learning and adaptive responses.
A new class of materials and structures with decentralized, local sensing, monitoring and response capabilities, will open the way to applications such as local self-healing of construction materials and biomedical prostheses, advanced monitoring and control of industrial systems, and next-generation unmanned vehicles and satellites.
News
Toward Mechano
Intelligence
In January 2026, we had the pleasure of organizing the seminar session “Toward Mechano Intelligence”, which led to a truly insightful discussion with our invited speakers from the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (CNR) of Rome.
NEW REPORT ON CORDIS
The report “Enabling self-learning and self-adaptation for materials, not people” has been published on the CORDIS – EU research results page.
PERSPECTIVE
An overview of the IMMENSE project has been published on the January 2026 edition of Open Access Government, you find it here at page 188!
NEW SEMINAR
On july 8th, Prof. Alberto Corigliano gave a Plenary Lecture at the 26th International Conference on Computer Methods in Mechanics (CMM 2025), wonderfully organized in Lodz by Prof. Marcin Kaminski and his team.
The lecture contains recent results produced by the ERC-IMMENSE team and a prospective vision concerning the way in which sentient materials and structures can be achieved.
NEW PAPER
The first paper from the ERC AdG project IMMENSE team has been published online in the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design:
“Mastering Truss Structure Optimization With Tree Search”
More info here
UPDATE
A short description of the IMMENSE project has been published on the Italian National newspaper “Il Sole 24 ore” , you can find it at page 16 using this link.