Intelligent Metasurface Cloak Reaches a New Plateau: AI-Assisted Surface Engineering for Self-Adaptive Supportive Invisibility

The past decades have witnessed the rapid development of metamaterial or metasurface cloaks, with different kinds of fascinating invisibility in phase-amplitude restoring. However, available cloaks realized thus far belong to contact-based framework; namely, they should adhere to the targets rather than being apart from each other with arbitrary distance (termed noncontact ones hereafter), which suffered from several critical shortcomings in practice. Here, we first briefly summarized some of the most important milestone works toward contact-based cloaks and then cast a holistic outlook for the conceptual noncontact stealth framework using supportive reconfigurable intelligent surface (SRIS) cloaks. Such transformative paradigm is typically composed of several SRISs deployed far away from the targets, and equipped with artificial intelligence in terms of various microcomputers, sensors, and actuators. The disruptive cloak framework full of cutting-edge techniques such as multidimensional perception, integrated radiation and scattering, and integrated sensing and communication promises to afford a brand new avenue and platform for next-generation invisibility due to their unprecedented flexibility, adaptability, and empowerment of future cloaks in interdisciplinary fields.