Towards animate droplets: Active, adaptive, and autonomous

Joe Forth, Robert Malinowski & Giorgio Volpe

Droplets, sub-millilitre liquid volumes with at least one interface, have traditionally served as compartments for storing, transporting, and delivering materials. Beyond familiar applications in food, coatings, and consumer goods, they find cutting-edge use in energy storage, sensing, and tissue engineering. The next frontier is their integration into animate matter, emerging materials defined by their levels of activity, adaptiveness, and autonomy. Easy to produce and dispense or print into complex structures, and with enormous chemical versatility, droplets are ideal building blocks for animate matter. In this Perspective, we outline a roadmap for advancing animacy in droplets and call for a more concerted effort to integrate novel mechanisms for motility, sensing, and decision-making into droplet design. Although research on active droplets spans more than a century, achieving true autonomy, where droplets process multiple stimuli and respond without external control, remains a central challenge. We hope to inspire interdisciplinary collaboration towards applications in consumer goods, microfluidics, adaptive optics, tissue engineering, and soft robotics.