Bioinspired soft robotics: How do we learn from creatures?

TL;DR

This review explores how bioinspired soft robotics leverage biological functions like self-healing and self-responsiveness to enhance adaptability and functionality, analyzing current technologies, challenges, and future directions.

Contribution

It introduces a classification framework based on biological functions to systematically analyze bioinspired soft robotics and their applications.

Findings

Bio-inspired soft robots mimic functions like self-healing and self-circulatory.

Current technologies have specific advantages and limitations.

Potential applications are identified and future challenges discussed.

Abstract

Soft robotics has opened a unique path to flexibility and environmental adaptability, learning from nature and reproducing biological behaviors. Nature implies answers for how to apply robots to real life. To find out how we learn from creatures to design and apply soft robots, in this Review, we propose a classification method to summarize soft robots based on different functions of biological systems: self-growing, self-healing, self-responsive, and self-circulatory. The bio-function based classification logic is presented to explain why we learn from creatures. State-of-art technologies, characteristics, pros, cons, challenges, and potential applications of these categories are analyzed to illustrate what we learned from creatures. By intersecting these categories, the existing and potential bio-inspired applications are overviewed and outlooked to finally find the answer, that is, how we learn from creatures.