IAS Seminar #13/2026 Engineering Super-Human Senses...Architected Materials – Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng

Engineering Super-Human Senses with Intelligent Architected Materials Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng Human senses define how we perceive and interact with the physical world through vision, hearing, and touch. While robotic systems have achieved super-human capabilities in vision, they remain far behind human touch perception due to the limited availability of integrated mechanical–electronic sensory architectures. Advanced manufacturing is expanding the design space for multi-scale, three-dimensional architectures, yet the direct co-fabrication of structural, dielectric, conductive, and active materials remains a fundamental challenge. Unlike biological tissues, which intrinsically integrate sensing, actuation, and control, synthetic materials rarely achieve comparable system-level functionality. In this talk, I will present rapid printing and design strategies that enable rapid, compositionally precise assembly of diverse materials into intelligent architected materials. These approaches unlock entirely new behaviors, including custom tailored piezoelectric effects, electro-acoustic coupling, and mechanical logic. The resulting “intelligent solids” embed sensing and actuation directly into their structure, enabling robotic tactile sensing, real-time texture recognition, and distributed force detection at fingertip-scale resolution. These materials function as artificial mechanoreceptors, pointing toward a new class of embodied, adaptive matter for robotics, wearable systems, and human–machine interfaces. At the express wish of the author, the slides have been intentionally withheld until the related scientific work has been formally published.