[1] Robotic materials can be considered computational metamaterials in that they extend the original definition of a metamaterial[2] as "macroscopic composites having a man-made, three-dimensional, periodic cellular architecture designed to produce an optimized combination, not available in nature, of two or more responses to specific excitation" by being fully programmable.
That is, unlike in a conventional metamaterial, the relationship between a specific excitation and response is governed by sensing, actuation, and a computer program that implements the desired logic.
[7] As such it intersects the fields of composite materials, sensor networks, distributed algorithms, and due to the scale of the involved computation, swarm intelligence.
Unlike any individual field, the design of the structure, sensors, actuators, communication infrastructure, and distributed algorithms are tightly intertwined.
Similarly, structural properties are closely related to the actual embedding of computing and communication infrastructure.