Robotic Materials With Bioinspired Microstructures for High Sensitivity and Fast Actuation

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.