Bioinspired Soft‐Skeleton Robotics With Cooperative Shape Transformation and Stiffness Adaptation

Soft robotics, owing to their intrinsic flexibility, safe physical interaction, and adaptability to complex environments, has demonstrated great potential across a wide range of applications. However, their inherent softness limits load‐bearing capacity. Although variable‐stiffness strategies have been explored, existing approaches typically require complex combinations of independently tunable moduli and often rely on vacuum‐based actuation, leading to cumbersome designs and constrained performance. Inspired by the “bone and muscle” structure of biological systems, we present a pneumatically actuated soft‐skeleton robot that integrates variable‐stiffness chain skeletons within soft textile materials to form a unified robotic structure. The chain skeletons remain highly flexible in the initial state but become stiffened during inflation‐induced shape morphing. This embedded chain skeleton effectively enhances output force while maintaining the highly deformable actuation of soft robots. This approach offers a new design paradigm for high‐performance soft robotics, enabling improved load capacity and morphological adaptability.