Soft actuation remains the key bottleneck in creating soft robots with flexible deformation and agile locomotion similar to nature creatures. Despite extensive efforts, it remains performance trade-offs among speed, strain, force, and portability of auxiliary equipment for existing soft actuators, thus also presents significant challenges for developing untethered soft robots with high mobility. Recently, researchers from Tongji University report a new concept of electrohydraulic origami which combines the transmission and reconfiguration of compliant origami structures with high dynamic soft electrohydraulic actuation to create powerful, programmable and multimodal soft actuators. The resulting lightweight, compliant, scalable, and reconfigurable electrohydraulic origami actuators open up a new way for building and actuating soft robots with fast, agile, and multimodal locomotion.

Engineers in the Journal of Bioresources and Bioproducts embed WO₃ and silver nanowires in a densified wood membrane, delivering 78 % optical modulation after 1 000 bends and 120 colour cycles with 96 % retention. The new dual-response composite transmits 86 % of visible light in the bleached state, blocks 92 % of incoming UV, and needs only 7.6 s to darken under 0.6 V. Because the substrate is regenerated cellulose, devices can be recycled by ethanol wiping and re-spraying, avoiding the brittle indium-tin-oxide electrodes that normally end in e-waste.