Simultaneous tactile–morphological perception enables sensorimotor autonomy in soft robots

Biological systems navigate and interact with complex, dynamic environments by seamlessly integrating proprioception and exteroception to drive sophisticated sensorimotor loops. Soft robots mimic biological compliance, yet equipping them with simultaneous, body-wide, decoupled shape and tactile sensing remains a fundamental barrier to achieving similar sensorimotor autonomy. Here we report a fully stretchable, shape-agnostic electronic skin that overcomes this limitation to enable unified three-dimensional (3D) tactile–morphological perception. This breakthrough integrates a shape-conforming, stretchable architecture with tomography-inspired sensing and a physics-informed inversion pipeline to decouple co-occurring mechanical inputs and reconstruct sub-millimetre shape deformations while simultaneously mapping external touch or hydrodynamic stimuli at over 30 Hz. We demonstrate that this sensory feedback closes the sensorimotor loop by enabling diverse autonomous behaviours from adaptive locomotion and evasive swimming to intuitive human-robot interaction. These results define a general and scalable route to embodied intelligence, paving the way for soft machines with life-like sensorimotor responsiveness.