Abstract Soft robots capable of self-driven information transmission hold great promise for enabling intelligent interactions that better emulate the behavior of living organisms; however, achieving such systems remains elusive. Here, we present an all-in-one optically interactive soft robot that seamlessly integrates holographic command encoding, encryption, and display with on-demand task execution. By leveraging the unique combination of liquid crystal and silk fibroin, this system achieves a synergistic integration of multi-degree-of-freedom actuation and information multiplexing within an all-soft-matter modular architecture. This “information-machine” coupling paradigm encodes task instructions into encrypted holographic feedback, ensuring the reliable execution of complex operations only upon accurate decoding. As demonstrations, we showcase an intelligent gripper capable of precise object grasping and classification in response to decoded holographic commands, as well as a walking robot that navigates a maze guided by multi-level, decrypted holographic pathways. The proposed strategy establishes a new framework for developing interactive soft robots that closely mimic living organisms by employing light as a central information carrier.
Zhang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.