Oxford Team Builds Air-Powered Soft Robots That Sync Themselves—No Electronics Required
Researchers at the University of Oxford have unveiled a new class of soft robots that move, sense, and even coordinate their actions without electronics, motors, or onboard computers—relying entirely on air pressure. Their study, published in Advanced Materials, demonstrates “fluidic robots” capable of generating rhythmic motion and spontaneously falling into synchrony, similar to how fireflies begin flashing together.
Cracking a Core Challenge in Soft Robotics
Soft robots are prized for navigating rough terrain and handling delicate tasks, but giving them built-in intelligence—without relying on complex electronics—remains a major hurdle. Traditional systems require sensors, processors, and software to control movement. The Oxford team instead encoded behavior directly into the robot’s physical structure.
The breakthrough centers on a small modular unit, a few centimeters across, that uses air pressure to perform tasks normally handled by circuits:
Actuation: moving or deforming like a muscle
Sensing: detecting pressure or contact
Logic: switching airflow on/off like a mechanical logic gate
Like LEGO bricks, identical modules can be snapped together to create entirely different robots. In tabletop demos, the team built robots that hopped, shook, crawled, and even sorted beads.
Emergent Behavior—No Programming Needed
Under constant air pressure, a single module can automatically combine actuation, sensing, and switching to create rhythmic self-driven motion. Link several modules together and their movements naturally synchronize—without any electronics or programming. Coordination emerges purely from physical interactions with the ground.
This allowed the team to build:
A shaker robot that sorted beads by tilting a rotating platform
A crawler robot that sensed the edge of a table and stopped before falling
All behavior was fully mechanical.
Embodied Intelligence in Action
The results demonstrate a shift from robots that carry intelligence to robots that are intelligent through their design. Embedding decision-making into the body leads to machines that are fast, efficient, and naturally adaptive to unpredictable environments.
The team used the Kuramoto model—commonly applied to synchronized biological systems—to explain how the robots fall into rhythm. Ground forces transmitted through friction, compression, and rebound create feedback loops that coordinate the limbs.
What’s Next
Although the prototypes are tabletop-sized, the design principles scale. The researchers aim to build untethered locomotion systems that operate efficiently in extreme environments where electronics struggle—opening the door to low-power, resilient robots for exploration and hazardous tasks.
The full study, “Multifunctional Fluidic Units for Emergent, Responsive Robotic Behaviors,” appears in Advanced Materials.
