Soft metamaterials provide a promising platform for robotics, biomedical devices, and flexible electronics. The localized mechanical responses by nonuniform excitation are ubiquitous in soft materials, yet their controlled transmission across assemblies remains largely overlooked in metamaterial design, which critically constrains nontrivial functionalities with end-to-end and long-range deformation transmission. Here, we introduce an impedance-guided design framework that enables programmable transmission of localized deformation in modular soft metamaterials, achieving behaviors unattainable by intuitive design. By establishing a nonlinear model considering position-dependent interactions and integrating the concept of mechanical impedance within metamaterials, we regulate assembly-level transmission solely through unit-cell topology optimization. The resulting framework enables effective synthesis of module families, allowing both homogeneous and heterogeneous assemblies to be custom-built with markedly enhanced transmission characteristics. Leveraging the highly combinatorial and extensible design space, we physically realize diverse on-demand displacement manipulation architectures, including obstacle-bypassing modular soft-metamaterial assemblies, defect-tolerant soft gripping, and embodied signal processing. Beyond deformation programming, the reconfigurability and reassemblability of these soft modules can embed electric logic signals, enabling energy-efficient and low-latency information processing through compliant-switch-controlled mechanical LED displays and wearable finger-motion-sensing controllers. Our method provides fundamental insights into localized deformation transmission in modular soft metamaterials and establishes a scalable route toward embodied-intelligence material systems, particularly for soft-metamaterial-centric actuation, sensing, and collective computing.
In biological systems, sensing is not performed by the brain alone: the body deforms, vibrates, and filters external stimuli before they are transduced into neural signals. In engineered systems, this processing burden is placed largely on electronics and computation, while the mechanical body is usually designed only for strength and stability. Here, we present sensing intelligence as a trainable property of the body. We show that the geometry of a metamaterial can be optimized to reshape external stimuli into internal signals that are easier for a neural network to interpret. Rather than hand-designing this physical preprocessing, we let the neural network train its own body for sensing by backpropagating the sensing loss to the body's design parameters through differentiable simulation. Across numerical and experimental sensing scenarios, the optimized body improves sensing accuracy by up to fivefold or reduces the number of required electronic sensors by nearly an order of magnitude.
Metamaterial discovery seeks microstructured materials whose geometry induces targeted mechanical behavior. Existing inverse-design methods can efficiently generate candidates, but they typically require explicit numerical property targets and are less suitable for early-stage exploration, where researchers often begin with incomplete constraints and qualitative intents expressed in natural language. Large language models can interpret such intents, but they lack geometric awareness and physical property validity. To address this gap, we propose MetaSymbO, a multi-agent framework for language-guided Metamaterial discovery via Symbolic-driven latent evOlution. Specifically, MetaSymbO contains three agents: a Designer that interprets free-form design intents and retrieves a semantically consistent scaffold, a Generator that synthesizes candidate microstructures in a disentangled latent space, and a Supervisor that provides fast property-aware feedback for iterative refinement. To move beyond the limitations of reproducing known samples from literature and training data, we further introduce symbolic-driven latent evolution, which applies programmable operators over disentangled latent factors to compose, modify, and refine structures at inference time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that (i) MetaSymbO improves structural validity by up to 34% in symmetry and nearly 98% in periodicity compared to state-of-the-art baselines; (ii) MetaSymbO achieves about 6-7% higher language-guidance scores while maintaining superior structure novelty compared to advanced reasoning LLMs; (iii) qualitative analyses confirm the effectiveness of symbolic logic operators in enabling programmable semantic alignment; and (iv) realworld case studies on auxetic, high-stiffness metamaterial design further validate its practical capability.
Disordered metamaterials feature microstructures with inherent randomness and irregularity, enabling them to achieve broader property coverage and superior performance unavailable in their regular counterparts. Despite their promise, designing disordered microstructures is substantially harder than designing regular ones. Their design remains trapped between manual parameterizations with limited expressiveness, and generative AI that is data-hungry and struggles to generalize. To address these limitations, we propose a generative design framework based on Neural Cellular Automata that dynamically grows complex microstructures through learned local interaction rules, inspired by the self-organizing processes in natural materials. This framework requires only a single training template, yet accommodates diverse disordered microstructures and adapts to irregular domains and arbitrary discretizations. By manipulating the learned local rules, we can steer the growth process to generate microstructures unseen during training, providing control over orientation, anisotropy, and directional thickness without retraining. As a dynamic, local growth process, it naturally produces spatially varying microstructures that transition smoothly to enable location-specific mechanical properties. We demonstrate this in a multiscale mechanical cloaking design, where microstructures vary across the space to meet an optimized heterogeneous property distribution. Our design enables excellent cloaking performance without complicated post-processing and incompatible assembly common in existing methods. This data-efficient, generalizable approach opens access to previously intractable disordered materials for biomedical implants and soft robotics.