Bioinspired underwater soft robots: from biology to robotics and back
Abstract Soft-bodied marine organisms inspire underwater soft robots. We distill four biological principles that guide robotic design, including locomotion, compliant morphologies and materials, distributed sensing, and adaptive control. We frame a bidirectional loop from biology to robotics and back in which robots act as physical models to probe biological mechanisms that are difficult to isolate in living animals. We further propose a biouniversal design strategy that moves beyond any single organism.
Authors
- D.-C. He (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9641-793X)
- Shihan Kong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6714-1313)
- Boyang Qin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9421-7240)
- Junzhi Yu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6347-572X)
- Yiyuan Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6506-1993)
- Jian Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3742-9671)
- Lei Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1281-6472)
- Yanyu Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1416-9216)
- Bo Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2888-0279)
- Wenzhuo Gao
Institutions
- National University of Singapore (SG)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Peking University (CN)
- Institute of Hydrobiology (CN)
- Shandong Institute of Automation (CN)
- Robotics Research (United States) (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- npj Robotics
- Published
- 2026-04-23
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s44182-026-00088-x
- Primary Topic
- Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- China Postdoctoral Science Foundation
- Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province
- Beijing Nova Program