Six-degree-of-freedom acoustic manipulation of levitated macroscopic rigid bodies

Acoustic levitation enables contact-free particle manipulation, yet dynamic six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) control of non-spherical macroscopic bodies has remained out of reach: rotational and translational dynamics couple non-trivially, and existing demonstrations are restricted to spherical objects or static configurations, or achieve motion by mechanically repositioning the levitator. We demonstrate controlled, stable, and purely field-based 6-DOF manipulation of macroscopic non-spherical rigid bodies on a stationary phased array system, using kinematic feedforward control without any object-specific dynamic model. The architecture combines a Galerkin boundary element model of acoustic radiation forces and torques with our semidefinite programming (SDP) framework for translating optimized pressure fields. Rotational keyframes are obtained offline via nonlinear optimization and stored in a lookup table (LUT) sampling the rotational workspace. SDP then translates the incident pressure field of any LUT entry within the working volume. For a reference trajectory, retrieved keyframes and shifted fields are merged offline into a phase sequence streamed at a 1 ms update rate without re-trapping. Experiments on a wooden cross and stick validate the architecture in the Mie and geometric regimes. Static rotational precision at LUT-sampled poses stays below 0.45° (mean) across all examined axes, with peak deviations up to 2.82° at large angles. Dynamic manipulation at velocities up to 40 mm/s achieves tracking errors below about 3% of the object length. Supplementary material videos show linear and infinity symbol trajectories, continuous 6-DOF maneuvers in a single uninterrupted run, and trajectory composition at non-trivial poses. These results open the route to closed-loop control of macroscopic objects.