Southern three-banded armadillo (Tolypeutes matacus), curled in a human hand.

When a three-banded armadillo senses danger, it doesn’t run or fight. Instead, it transforms itself into a living shield, curling into a nearly impenetrable ball of armor. 

Researchers have now given machines a similar survival instinct, creating a structure that can detect danger and rapidly fold itself into protective armor.

This armadillo-inspired armor could help safeguard fragile soft robots, flexible electronics, and other sensitive devices operating in hazardous environments where they must remain flexible while withstanding physical threats.

“There has been a great deal of growth in the fields of soft robotics and flexible electronics, but those devices are often also fragile. Our goal was to develop a solution that allows these fragile technologies to function but protects them when necessary,” Yong Zhu, one of the study authors and a professor at North Carolina State University, said. 

Why protecting soft machines has been so difficult A stuffed three-banded armadillo. Image credits: John Cummings/Wikimedia Commons

Soft robots and flexible electronics are designed to easily bend, stretch, and adapt to their surroundings. Those same qualities, however, also make them highly vulnerable to physical damage. 

“This trade-off becomes especially limiting in extreme environments such as space exploration, search-and-rescue missions, and personal protective wearables, where adaptability must be accompanied by resistance against impact, puncture, or abrasion,” the researchers note.

Engineers have spent years borrowing ideas from nature to make these systems more resilient, including protective structures inspired by scales, shells, and armored animals. 

However, most of these systems are passive, which means they can shield a device once they are in place, but cannot sense danger or react to it independently.

An armadillo, on the other hand, when threatened, activates its muscles and folds into a rigid sphere that combines external protection with internal structural support. 

The researchers focused on reproducing this sequence of sensing, movement, and protection in an engineered system.

How the armadillo-inspired armor works

The study authors developed a structure called the Morpho-Interlocking Protective Module (MIPM), which is built from three layers that work together. The outer layer consists of curved, overlapping scales made from 3D-printed resin. These scales act like armor, forming a protective exterior but only when the structure folds.

The relaxed and curled (actuated) armadillo-inspired armor. Image credits: Jianyu Zhou, NC State University

The middle layer serves as both the sensing and actuation system. It contains a strain sensor made from an elastic polymer embedded with silver nanowires, a liquid-crystal elastomer (LCE) that contracts when heated, a layer of Kapton tape that expands when heated, and a conductive fabric layer that functions as a heater.

When the sensor detects touch, pressure, or impact, it sends a signal to a control unit. The controller activates the heater, causing the LCE to shrink while the Kapton tape expands. 

Since the two materials respond differently to heat, the entire structure bends and eventually curls into a compact protective shape.

The response is triggered when electricity passes through the conductive fabric layer, generating heat that activates the surrounding materials. 

This allows the system to convert a mechanical signal (such as pressure or impact) into a rapid shape change, creating an integrated sensing-and-response loop that many previous bio-inspired protective systems lacked.

The Interlocking scales create a stronger protective shell

The innermost layer provides one of the design’s most important features. It consists of heavy-duty folded paper supporting rigid polymer segments arranged like an internal spine.

As the device curls, these segments lock together, creating a rigid internal framework. This interlocking mechanism significantly increases the structure’s stiffness without sacrificing flexibility during normal operation.

The researchers tested several configurations and found that increasing the number of internal segments generally improved strength because more locking connections formed during curling. 

However, additional segments also increased weight and complexity. Their experiments showed that a design with 10 internal segments offered the best balance, with only modest gains achieved by adding more.

“Although the MIPM-12 (with 12 segments) exhibits slightly higher load-bearing capacity than the MIPM-10 (10 segments), the improvement is only 2.9%. Considering the higher fabrication cost and self-weight of the MIPM-12, the MIPM-10 was chosen as the optimized configuration for subsequent experiments,” the study authors added.

In proof-of-concept tests, the optimized structure withstood roughly 10 newtons of force and successfully protected enclosed components from impacts and concentrated loads. However, the benefits of the design extended beyond basic load resistance. 

Once curled into its protective configuration, the structure became about 667.5 times stiffer than in its flat state. The overlapping outer scales also significantly improved puncture protection, increasing puncture resistance by more than 180 percent compared with similar structures that lacked the armadillo-inspired exoskeleton.

In one demonstration, the curled structure used controlled rolling to move across a surface, suggesting that future versions could do more than simply shield sensitive payloads. 

Rather than remaining stationary after detecting danger, a protective system based on the same principles could potentially move itself away from hazardous conditions while keeping vulnerable components enclosed inside.

Teaching machines to protect themselves

The ability to automatically switch from a flexible structure to a protective shell could open new possibilities for technologies that operate in unpredictable environments. 

For example, future versions of MIPM could help protect soft robots navigating disaster zones, wearable devices exposed to daily wear and tear, or robotic systems exploring remote locations where repairs may not be possible. 

As the design can both shield fragile payloads and potentially move away from hazards through controlled rolling, it offers more than passive protection.

“We’ve demonstrated a combination of flexibility and mechanical protection that has a lot of potential, and we welcome collaborations from those who are interested in exploring possible applications,” Zhu added.

However, the armadillo-inspired armor is still in its early stages. The experiments were carried out under controlled laboratory conditions, and the researchers say additional work is needed before the system can be deployed in real-world environments. 

Future efforts will focus on ensuring the sensors remain reliable in extreme temperatures, humidity, dust, and other challenging conditions. Moreover, the team also plans to improve wireless communication capabilities to make the system more practical outside the lab.

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.