Encoded sewing soft textile robots.

Incorporating soft actuation with soft yet durable textiles could effectively endow the latter with active and flexible shape morphing and motion like mollusks and plants. However, creating highly programmable and customizable soft robots based on textiles faces a longstanding design and manufacturing challenge. Here, we report a methodology of encoded sewing constraints for efficiently constructing three-dimensional (3D) soft textile robots through a simple 2D sewing process. By encoding heterogeneous stretching properties into three spatial seams of the sewed 3D textile shells, nonlinear inflation of the inner bladder can be guided to follow the predefined spatial shape and actuation sequence, for example, tendril-like shape morphing, tentacle-like sequential manipulation, and bioinspired locomotion only controlled by single pressure source. Such flexible, efficient, scalable, and low-cost design and formation methodology will accelerate the development and iteration of soft robots and also open up more opportunities for safe human-robot interactions, tailored wearable devices, and health care.

Self-vectoring electromagnetic soft robots with high operational dimensionality.

Soft robots capable of flexible deformations and agile locomotion similar to biological systems are highly desirable for promising applications, including safe human-robot interactions and biomedical engineering. Their achievable degree of freedom and motional deftness are limited by the actuation modes and controllable dimensions of constituent soft actuators. Here, we report self-vectoring electromagnetic soft robots (SESRs) to offer new operational dimensionality via actively and instantly adjusting and synthesizing the interior electromagnetic vectors (EVs) in every flux actuator sub-domain of the robots. As a result, we can achieve high-dimensional operation with fewer actuators and control signals than other actuation methods. We also demonstrate complex and rapid 3D shape morphing, bioinspired multimodal locomotion, as well as fast switches among different locomotion modes all in passive magnetic fields. The intrinsic fast (re)programmability of SESRs, along with the active and selective actuation through self-vectoring control, significantly increases the operational dimensionality and possibilities for soft robots.

A wave-confining metasphere beamforming acoustic sensor for superior human-machine voice interaction.

Highly sensitive, source-tracking acoustic sensing is essential for effective and natural human-machine interaction based on voice. It is a known challenge to omnidirectionally track sound sources under a hypersensitive rate with low noise interference using a compact sensor. Here, we present a unibody acoustic metamaterial spherical shell with equidistant defected piezoelectric cavities, referred to as the metasphere beamforming acoustic sensor (MBAS). It demonstrates a wave-confining capability and low self-noise, simultaneously achieving an outstanding intrinsic signal-to-noise ratio (72 dB) and an ultrahigh sensitivity (137 mVpp/Pa or -26.3 dBV), with a range spanning the daily phonetic frequencies (0 to 1500 Hz) and omnidirectional beamforming for the perception and spatial filtering of sound sources. Moreover, the MBAS-based auditory system is shown for high-performance audio cloning, source localization, and speech recognition in a noisy environment without any signal enhancement, revealing its promising applications in various voice interaction systems.