Fluid-driven artificialmuscles: bio-design, manufacturing, sensing, control, and applications

Developing artificial muscles that can replace biological muscles to accomplish various tasks iswhat we have long been aiming for.Recent advances in flexible materials and 3D printing technology greatly promote the development of artificial muscle technology.A variety of flexible material-based artificial muscles that are driven by different external stimuli,including pressure,voltage,light,magnetism,temperature,etc.,have been developed.Among these,fluid-driven artificial muscles(FAMs),which can convert the power of fluid(gas or liquid)into the force output and displacement of flexible materials,are the most widely used actuation methods for industrial robots,medical instruments,and human-assisted devices due to their simplicity,excellent safety,large actuation force,high energy efficiency,and low cost.Herein,the bio-design,manufacturing,sensing,control,and applications of FAMs are introduced,including conventional pneumatic/hydraulic artificial muscles and several innovative artificial muscles driven by functional fluids.What’s more,the challenges and future directions of FAMs are discussed.

Reprogrammable, intelligent soft origami LEGO coupling actuation, computation, and sensing

Tightly integrating actuation,computation,and sensing in soft materials allows soft robots to respond autonomously to their environments.However,fusing these capabilities within a single soft module in an effi-cient,programmable,and compatible way is still a significant challenge.Here,we introduce a strategy for integrating actuation,computation,and sensing capabilities in soft origami.Unified and plug-and-play soft origami modules can be reconfigured into diverse morphologies with specific functions or reprogrammed into a variety of soft logic circuits,similar to LEGO bricks.We built an untethered autonomous soft turtle that is able to sense stimuli,store data,process information,and perform swimming movements.The function multiplexing and signal compatibility of the origami minimize the number of soft devices,thereby reducing the complexity and redundancy of soft robots.Moreover,this origami also exhibits strong damage resistance and high durability.We envision that this work will offer an effective way to readily create on-demand soft robots that can operate in unknown environments.

A paradigm shift in liquid cooling by multitextured surface design

Effective thermal management of high-temperature systems,including rapid cooling and accurate temperature control,has been a necessity in many industrial applications,such as electronics,spacecraft,and nuclear power plants.The well-establishedwater spraying and soaking are among themost commonly used strategies for thermal cooling.Direct contact of water with a hot surface releases the latent energy by the liquid-vapour phase change,presenting a remarkable cooling strategy.

Single-cell technologies:From research to application

In recent years,more and more single-cell technologies have been developed.A vast amount of single-cell omics data has been generated by large projects,such as the Human Cell Atlas,the Mouse Cell Atlas,the Mouse RNA Atlas,the Mouse ATAC Atlas,and the Plant Cell Atlas.Based on these single-cell big data,thousands of bioinformatics algorithms for quality control,clustering,cell-type annotation,developmental inference,cell-cell transition,cell-cell interaction,and spatial analysis are developed.With powerful experimental single-cell technology and state-of-the-art big data analysis methods based on artificial intelligence,the molecular landscape at the single-cell level can be revealed.