Drawing inspiration from cohesive integration of skeletal muscles and sensory skins in vertebrate animals, we present a design strategy of soft robots, primarily consisting of an electronic skin (e-skin) and an artificial muscle. These robots integrate multifunctional sensing and on-demand actuation into a biocompatible platform using an in-situ solution-based method. They feature biomimetic designs that enable adaptive motions and stress-free contact with tissues, supported by a battery-free wireless module for untethered operation. Demonstrations range from a robotic cuff for detecting blood pressure, to a robotic gripper for tracking bladder volume, an ingestible robot for pH sensing and on-site drug delivery, and a robotic patch for quantifying cardiac function and delivering electrotherapy, highlighting the application versatilities and potentials of the bio-inspired soft robots. Our designs establish a universal strategy with a broad range of sensing and responsive materials, to form integrated soft robots for medical technology and beyond.
Topological magnons are bosonic analogues of topological fermions in electronic systems. They have been studied extensively by theory but rarely realized by experiment. Here, by performing inelastic neutron scattering measurements on single crystals of a two-dimensional ferromagnet , which was classified as Dirac magnon semimetal featured by the linear bands crossing at the Dirac points, we fully map out the magnetic excitation spectra, and reveal that there is an apparent gap of meV between the acoustic and optical branches of the magnons at the K point. By collaborative efforts between experiment and theoretical calculations using a five-orbital Hubbard model obtained from first-principles calculations to derive the exchange parameters, we find that a Hamiltonian with Heisenberg exchange interactions, next-nearest-neighbor Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction, and single-ion anisotropy is more appropriate to describe the system. Calculations using the model show that the lower and upper magnon bands separated by the gap exhibit Chern numbers of . These results indicate that is a topological magnon insulator, where the nontrivial gap is a result of the DM interaction.