Xuelin Wu

Folding flexible printed circuitboards (FPCBs) into origami patterns offers a route to fabricating robots with actuation, sensing, and control fully integrated into the robot body. However, integrating electronics into origami robots introduces a coupled electrical and mechanical design problem since the circuit layout affects the local stiffness and mass distribution and therefore the deformation mechanics. We explore this problem in the context of the FPCB CurveQuad, a centimeter‐scale curved‐crease origami quadruped. The robot body is fabricated as a folded double‐sided FPCB that contains the crease pattern, copper routing, sensors, local stiffening features, and electrical interfaces. A single servomotor drives tendons on the underside of the body, enabling the sheet to self‐fold from a planar state and twist for crawling and steering. The resulting robot is 60 mm 65 mm 50 mm in the folded state and weighs 10.9 g. It crawls at 16.8 mm (0.259 body lengths ), steers by shifting the actuator oscillation range, and is capable of feedback control. We present our design process for this robot, illustrating strategies for addressing electromechanical co‐design with complex bending requirements, enabling folded FPCBs to function as robotic mechanisms rather than simply as passive electronics substrates.

Skeletal muscles produce coordinated large, smooth, reversible, and precise deformations through integrated sensing, actuation, and feedback control. Replicating this level of multifunctionality in artificial muscles remains elusive, particularly because many soft actuators lack real‐time, on‐demand control over intermediate actuation states. Here, we introduce CoilLCE, an electronically controlled artificial muscle comprising liquid crystal elastomer (LCE)/graphene composite fibers embedded with a flexible, self‐sensing Joule‐heating copper coil. By exploiting the well‐defined monotonic relationship between temperature and actuation strain, CoilLCE enables closed‐loop, multistage actuation with programmable intermediate states. We further reveal a muscle‐like soft yet tough mechanical response in LCE/graphene composites with only 0.25 wt.% graphene. The reduced modulus facilitates antagonistic coordination, achieving an antagonistic actuation strain of 16.1 ± 0.7%, compared with 11.2 ± 0.8% for pure LCE, corresponding ∼44% enhancement, while preserving high actuation performance, yielding a large actuation strain (> 40%), strain rates up to 30% s ⁻¹ , and a work capacity of 343 J kg ⁻¹ . As demonstrations, CoilLCE‐actuated robotic fingers play piano keys with tunable force and speed, and four antagonistic CoilLCE pairs generate on‐demand eye movements. This work advances LCEs from programmable shape‐morphing materials toward controllable, self‐sensing, and system‐integrable artificial muscles for dexterous, adaptive, and expressive soft robotics.