# Robotic Materials With Bioinspired Microstructures for High Sensitivity and Fast Actuation

## TL;DR

This review explores how bioinspired microstructures in soft materials improve robotic systems' sensing, actuation, and computation abilities for autonomous devices.

## Contribution

The paper introduces design principles and fabrication strategies for bioinspired microstructures in robotic materials with integrated computation.

## Key findings

- Bioinspired microstructures enhance pressure sensing, actuation, and computation in soft materials.
- Performance maps from literature reveal trends and comparisons in bioinspired robotic material capabilities.
- Embedding computation into materials enables autonomous and self-adaptable structures.

## Abstract

Functional soft materials with sensing and actuation capabilities enable the creation of autonomous devices and structures. Taking inspiration from natural microstructures of living organisms, a new generation of robotic materials that sense, compute, and actuate is being developed. This manuscript reviews how the integration of bioinspired microstructures into soft materials contributes to enhancing their performance for pressure sensing, actuation, and computation. The design principles for developing such microstructures are outlined, along with discussions of the fabrication strategies. Performance maps are drawn from literature data to allow comparisons of capabilities and to determine trends. Finally, the emerging approaches to embed computation with sensing and actuating into a single robotic material are presented. Overall, this review demonstrates that leveraging bioinspired microstructures into synthetic and functional systems can unlock new material properties that could be deployed in larger autonomous and self‐adaptable structures. In the context of sustainable development, relying on microstructure for performance allows the use of new feedstocks while achieving desired functionalities.

In the review paper, design rationale and approaches for bioinspired sensors and actuators in robotics applications are presented. These bioinspired microstructure strategies implemented in both can improve the performance in several ways. Also, recent ideas and innovations that embed robotic materials with logic and computation with it are part of the discussion.