Very nice work. I’m curious: what kinds of projects are you guys currently working on that genuinely push you out of your comfort zone?

I had a small epiphany a couple of weeks ago while thinking about robot skin design: using conductive 3D-printed structures whose electrical properties change under strain, combined with electrical impulses, a handful of electrodes, a machine-learning model to interpret the measurements, and computational design to optimize the printed geometry.

While digging into the literature, I realized that what I was trying to do already has a name: proprioception via electrical impedance tomography. It turns out the field is very active right now.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/robotic-skin

That realization led me to build a Bergström–Boyce nonlinear viscoelastic parallel rheological simulator using Taichi. This is far outside my comfort zone. I’m just a regular programmer with no formal background in physics (apart from some past exposure to Newton-Raphson).

Interestingly, my main contribution hasn’t been the math. It’s been providing basic, common-sense guidance to my LLM. For example, I had to explicitly tell it which parameters were fixed by experimental data and which ones were meant to be inferred. In another case, the agent assumed that all the red curves in the paper I'm working with referred to the same sample, when they actually correspond to different conducting NinjaFlex specimens under strain.

Correcting those kinds of assumptions, rather than fixing equations, was what allowed me to reproduce the results I was seeking. I now have an analytical, physics-grounded model that fits the published data. Mullins effect: modeled. Next up: creep.

We’ll see how far this goes. I’ll probably never produce anything publishable, patentable, or industrial-grade. But I might end up building a very cheap (and hopefully not that inaccurate), printable proprioceptive sensor, with a structure optimized so it can be interpreted by much smaller neural networks than those used in the Cambridge paper.

If that works, the gesture will have been worth it.