Joint MSE/ME Talk: Rayne Zheng, UC Berkeley

Speaker: Rayne Zheng, UC Berkeley

Title: Engineering Super-Human Senses with Intelligent Architected Materials

Abstract: Human senses define how we perceive and interact with the physical world through vision, hearing, and touch. While robotic systems have achieved super-human capabilities in vision, they remain far behind human touch perception due to the limited availability of integrated mechanical– electronic sensory architectures. Advanced manufacturing is expanding the design space for multi-scale, three-dimensional architectures, yet the direct co-fabrication of structural, dielectric, conductive, and active materials remains a fundamental challenge. Unlike biological tissues, which intrinsically integrate sensing, actuation, and control, synthetic materials rarely achieve comparable system-level functionality. In this talk, I will present rapid printing and design strategies that enable rapid, compositionally precise assembly of diverse materials into intelligent architected materials. These approaches unlock entirely new behaviors, including custom tailored piezoelectric effects, electro-acoustic coupling, and mechanical logic. The resulting “intelligent solids” embed sensing and actuation directly into their structure, enabling robotic tactile sensing, real-time texture recognition, and distributed force detection at fingertip-scale resolution. These materials function as artificial mechanoreceptors, pointing toward a new class of embodied, adaptive matter for robotics, wearable systems, and human–machine interfaces.

Bio: Xiaoyu “Rayne” Zheng is a professor in Material Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley, where he directs the Advanced Manufacturing and Metamaterials Laboratory. He is also a co-director at Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center and a faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Rayne is also a cofounder of Sensetics, Inc, providing robotics with a sense of touch. Rayne’s research focuses on creating the next-generation functional, structural, electronic and living materials by developing novel additive fabrication techniques for materials with controlled topologies. Prof. Zheng obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University with Prof. Xin Zhang. He has made pioneering contributions to the programmable assembly of functional, structural, and electronic materials, printing and processing highly responsive functional materials for transducers, sensors, and robotics applications. He has received multiple awards, including NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, DARPA Director’s Fellowship for Outstanding Project, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, Air Force Young Investigator Award, ASME Rising Star Award, 3M Faculty Award, Baker Fellow Award, International Freeform Fabrication and Additive Manufacturing Excellence (FAME) Award, among others.