Extended Data Fig. 5: High-voltage amplifier and electronics for control.

The electronic system of soft robot is mainly composed of a high-voltage amplifier and electronics for control. The high-voltage output is achieved by a three-stage circuit. The first stage is a boost circuit, which is dominated by a MP3431 chip to boost a 3.7-V battery voltage to 15 V. The second stage is the ‘flyback’ circuit, which boosts the voltage from 15 V to a maximum amplitude of 3 kV through a transformer. The third stage is a voltage-multiplier circuit, which can multiply the voltage output of the second stage, and finally produces the final voltage (maximum amplitude of 10 kV). The MCU tunes the voltage output with amplitude in the range of ~2–10 kV and frequency in the range of ~0.5–3.0 Hz.