  The rapidly developing robotics industry demands structures with novel
mechanical functions. Traditional approaches, developing new materials and
designing new structures, face two challenges. Highly complex
force-displacement functions can hardly be realized and one fabricated
structure only has one or limited function. We perform theoretical calculations
and FE simulations to demonstrate that the two challenges can be solved by
making the mechanical property or geometry of the structure tunable. The
mechanical property/geometry tuning approaches are further validated by
experimental tests and the results show that multiple different and highly
complex objective functions can be achieved accurately. We expect that the
proposed tuning approaches will facilitate the development of advanced forms of
mechanical metamaterials and a new generation of robotic hands.
