Spontaneous snapping-induced jet flows for fast, maneuverable surface and underwater soft flapping swimmer.

Manta rays use wing-like pectoral fins for intriguing oscillatory swimming. It provides rich inspiration for designing potentially fast, efficient, and maneuverable soft swimming robots, which, however, have yet to be realized. It remains a grand challenge to combine fast speed, high efficiency, and high maneuverability in a single soft swimmer while using simple actuation and control.

Reprogrammable and reconfigurable mechanical computing metastructures with stable and high-density memory.

Mechanical computing encodes information in deformed states of mechanical systems, such as multistable structures. However, achieving stable mechanical memory in most multistable systems remains challenging and often limited to binary information. Here, we report leveraging coupling kinematic bifurcation in rigid cube-based mechanisms with elasticity to create transformable, multistable mechanical computing metastructures with stable, high-density mechanical memory.

Fully 3D-Printed Miniature Soft Hydraulic Actuators with Shape Memory Effect for Morphing and Manipulation.

Miniature shape-morphing soft actuators driven by external stimuli and fluidic pressure hold great promise in morphing matter and small-scale soft robotics. However, it remains challenging to achieve both rich shape morphing and shape locking in a fast and controlled way due to the limitations of actuation reversibility and fabrication. Here, fully 3D-printed, sub-millimeter thin-plate-like miniature soft hydraulic actuators with shape memory effect (SME) for programable fast shape morphing and shape locking, are reported.

Defected twisted ring topology for autonomous periodic flip-spin-orbit soft robot.

Periodic spin-orbit motion is ubiquitous in nature, observed from electrons orbiting nuclei to spinning planets orbiting the Sun. Achieving autonomous periodic orbiting motions, along circular and noncircular paths, in soft mobile robotics is crucial for adaptive and intelligent exploration of unknown environments-a grand challenge yet to be accomplished. Here, we report leveraging a closed-loop twisted ring topology with a defect for an autonomous soft robot capable of achieving periodic spin-orbiting motions with programmed circular and re-programmed irregular-shaped trajectories.

Physically intelligent autonomous soft robotic maze escaper.

Autonomous maze navigation is appealing yet challenging in soft robotics for exploring priori unknown unstructured environments, as it often requires human-like brain that integrates onboard power, sensors, and control for computational intelligence. Here, we report harnessing both geometric and materials intelligence in liquid crystal elastomer-based self-rolling robots for autonomous escaping from complex multichannel mazes without the need for human-like brain. The soft robot powered by environmental thermal energy has asymmetric geometry with hybrid twisted and helical shapes on two ends.

Angle-programmed tendril-like trajectories enable a multifunctional gripper with ultradelicacy, ultrastrength, and ultraprecision.

Achieving multicapability in a single soft gripper for handling ultrasoft, ultrathin, and ultraheavy objects is challenging due to the tradeoff between compliance, strength, and precision. Here, combining experiments, theory, and simulation, we report utilizing angle-programmed tendril-like grasping trajectories for an ultragentle yet ultrastrong and ultraprecise gripper. The single gripper can delicately grasp fragile liquids with minimal contact pressure (0.

A kirigami-enabled electrochromic wearable variable-emittance device for energy-efficient adaptive personal thermoregulation.

For centuries, people have put effort to improve the thermal performance of clothing to adapt to varying temperatures. However, most clothing we wear today only offers a single-mode insulation. The adoption of active thermal management devices, such as resistive heaters, Peltier coolers, and water recirculation, is limited by their excessive energy consumption and form factor for long-term, continuous, and personalized thermal comfort.

Caterpillar-inspired soft crawling robot with distributed programmable thermal actuation.

Many inspirations for soft robotics are from the natural world, such as octopuses, snakes, and caterpillars. Here, we report a caterpillar-inspired, energy-efficient crawling robot with multiple crawling modes, enabled by joule heating of a patterned soft heater consisting of silver nanowire networks in a liquid crystal elastomer (LCE)-based thermal bimorph actuator. With patterned and distributed heaters and programmable heating, different temperature and hence curvature distribution along the body of the robot are achieved, enabling bidirectional locomotion as a result of the friction competition between the front and rear end with the ground.

Snapping for high-speed and high-efficient butterfly stroke-like soft swimmer.

Natural selection has tuned many flying and swimming animals to share the same narrow design space for high power efficiency, e.g., their dimensionless Strouhal numbers St that relate flapping frequency and amplitude and forward speed fall within the range of 0.

Self-Sustained Snapping Drives Autonomous Dancing and Motion in Free-Standing Wavy Rings.

Harnessing snapping, an instability phenomenon observed in nature (e.g., Venus flytraps), for autonomy has attracted growing interest in autonomous soft robots.

Twisting for soft intelligent autonomous robot in unstructured environments.

Soft robots that can harvest energy from environmental resources for autonomous locomotion is highly desired; however, few are capable of adaptive navigation without human interventions. Here, we report twisting soft robots with embodied physical intelligence for adaptive, intelligent autonomous locomotion in various unstructured environments, without on-board or external controls and human interventions. The soft robots are constructed of twisted thermal-responsive liquid crystal elastomer ribbons with a straight centerline.

Bistable and Multistable Actuators for Soft Robots: Structures, Materials, and Functionalities.

Snap-through bistability is often observed in nature (e.g., fast snapping to closure of Venus flytrap) and the life (e.

Boundary curvature guided programmable shape-morphing kirigami sheets.

Kirigami, a traditional paper cutting art, offers a promising strategy for 2D-to-3D shape morphing through cut-guided deformation. Existing kirigami designs for target 3D curved shapes rely on intricate cut patterns in thin sheets, making the inverse design challenging. Motivated by the Gauss-Bonnet theorem that correlates the geodesic curvature along the boundary with the Gaussian curvature, here, we exploit programming the curvature of cut boundaries rather than the complex cut patterns in kirigami sheets for target 3D curved morphologies through both forward and inverse designs.

Programmable active kirigami metasheets with more freedom of actuation.

Kirigami (cutting and/or folding) offers a promising strategy to reconfigure metamaterials. Conventionally, kirigami metamaterials are often composed of passive cut unit cells to be reconfigured under mechanical forces. The constituent stimuli-responsive materials in active kirigami metamaterials instead will enable potential mechanical properties and functionality, arising from the active control of cut unit cells.