Mechanical intelligence for high-performance soft swimming robotics

Dr. Haitao Qing,
Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley

Inspired by aquatic organisms, swimming robots offer promising opportunities for ocean waste cleanup, underwater monitoring, environmental sensing, and exploration in complex underwater environments. However, conventional robots rely on controller-centric architectures that separate sensing, computation, and actuation into distinct modules, often requiring complex feedback loops and computationally intensive control. By embedding mechanical intelligence into the robot body, underwater soft robots can transfer sensing, actuation, and decision-making from computation-heavy controllers to the physical structure itself, enabling high-performance swimming with minimal inputs.

In this talk, I will mainly present two high-performance underwater soft robots that embody mechanical intelligence. First, I will introduce a manta-like soft swimming robot that leverages spontaneous snapping stroke in the monostable flapping wing. This robot achieves a record-high speed of 6.8 body length per second and can navigate through underwater unstructured environments by simply tuning single actuation input. Second, I will introduce a feather star–inspired soft robotic swimmer that realizes three distinct swimming modes, jellyfish-like pulsation, fish-like propulsion, and rotor-like reorientation, using only two pneumatic inputs. This robot features a dual-channel bending actuator integrated with a monostable elastic ribbon frame, enabling synchronized, asymmetric, and out-of-phase snapping-induced flapping motions through simple modulation of actuation frequency and phase. Finally, I will briefly discuss several intelligent soft machines that combine rational structural design and smart functional materials to achieve diverse robotic functions. Together, these studies establish mechanical intelligence as a powerful framework for developing high-performance soft swimming robotics.

Bio: Haitao Qing is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Professor Lining Yao. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2025, and his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Hanyang University in 2019 and 2021, respectively. His research focuses on the intersection of mechanically intelligent soft robotics, shape morphing structures and smart functional materials. He is a recipient of the 2025 SES Future Faculty Award from the Society of Engineering Science.