Soft smart materials, with their ability to change shape in response to external stimuli, offer a promising pathway for advancing soft sensors and robotic actuators. These materials can already perform a wide range of robotic motions, including walking, swimming, jumping, and even gliding through the air. In this presentation, I will share our latest examples of wind-assisted flying robots equipped with light-responsive materials that enable light-steered aerial navigation. I will also discuss insights into physical intelligence arising from feedback between the stimulating field and the material’s responsiveness, through which a preliminary level of decision-making can be achieved.

Biodegradable robots are emerging as soft machines designed to explore natural environments, perform targeted missions, and ultimately disintegrate without retrieval, minimizing recovery costs and environmental impact. Realizing such systems requires fully transient technologies, including biodegradable polymeric frames, electronic sensors for perception and control, and power systems that leave no permanent residues. In this presentation, we highlight recent advances in biodegradable flexible electronics for soft robotic systems. We introduce high-performance sensor technologies based on organic–inorganic hybrid materials and their integration with soft, biodegradable robotic frames. We further discuss environmentally driven power technologies, including biodegradable silicon-based solar cells, thermoelectric and piezoelectric materials, and emerging biodegradable secondary batteries. We also demonstrate a pneumatically actuated biodegradable robot incorporating multimodal electronic sensors, enabling self-awareness, environmental perception, and closed-loop behaviors.

Intelligent soft actuators can convert external environmental stimuli such as light, electricity, heat, and humidity into their own mechanical deformation, and have important application value in the fields of soft robots, soft machines, intelligent devices, and flexible wearables. Among these stimuli, light and humidity, as widely existing stimuli in environment, are expected to serve as green sustainable energy sources for driving soft actuators and robots, enabling untethered actuation and contactless deformation. In this talk, I will introduce our recent research works on the design and fabrication of light/humidity-driven soft actuators based on MXene and polymer nanocomposites and their applications in bionic robots, including soft locomotive robots that can produce self-oscillating deformation and directional movement under natural sunlight irradiation, as well as intelligent devices that can generate controllable deformation under changes in environmental humidity with multiple functions such as sensing or color change.

Untethered micromachines require fabrication routes that can integrate diverse functional materials into complex 3D architectures free from conventional wiring or polymer-only printing. Here we present an optofluidic 3D micro-/nanofabrication strategy that converts light into directed flow to volumetrically assemble micro-/nanoparticles inside predefined 3D confinement. A femtosecond-laser heating spot generates a steep, localized thermal gradient that drives strong convective transport (up to several mm/s), continuously delivering dispersed building blocks into confinement and enabling rapid assembly into freeform 3D architectures. The competition between interparticle attraction (e.g., DLVO/van der Waals) and particle–fluid interactions provides design rules for robust assembly across solvent systems. We further demonstrate on-demand multifunctional microdevices, including size-selective microfluidic microvalves and multi-material microrobots exhibiting multimodal, multi-stimulus locomotion.

Different from neuron-based computational intelligence through the brain, physical intelligence leverages structural designs and smart materials to physically encode sensing, actuation, control, adaption, and decision-making into the body of an agent. The stimuli-responsive body materials can enable autonomous sensory, actuation, powering, and other physical intelligence functions. The structural designs of soft body can simplify the required actuation for deformation and motion, as well as enable real-time feedback control-free locomotion and self-adaption. I will discuss our recent work in embodying mechanical intelligence of structural designs and/or materials intelligence of soft active materials in soft robotics, for achieving high speed and high efficiency in locomotion, autonomy, and intelligence. First, I will talk about how to leverage snapping instabilities for achieving high-performance soft swimming robots and jumping devices. Spontaneous snapping stroke in the monostable flapping wing of a manta-like soft swimmer is utilized to achieve fast speed, high efficiency, and high maneuverability in a single soft swimmer while using simple actuation and control. The monostable wing is pneumatically actuated to instantaneously snap through to stroke down, and upon deflation, it will spontaneously stroke up by snapping back to its initial state, driven by elastic restoring force, without consuming additional energy. This largely simplifies designs, actuation, and control for achieving a record-high speed of 6.8 body length per second, high energy efficiency, and high maneuverability and collision resilience in navigating through underwater unstructured environments with obstacles by simply tuning single-input actuation frequencies. Second, I will discuss examples of integrating structural designs with soft active materials for achieving autonomy and intelligence in soft robots. We explored combining both geometric and materials intelligence in liquid crystal elastomer–based self-rolling robots for autonomous escaping from complex multichannel mazes without the need for human-like brain. Combining self-snapping for motion reflection, it shows unique curved zigzag paths to avoid entrapment, which allows for successful self-escaping from various challenging mazes, including mazes on granular terrains, mazes with narrow gaps, and even mazes with in situ changing layouts. We further showed that simply binding the two ends of the twisted ribbon forms a closed-loop twisted ring topology alongside a defect at the binding site, generating distinct self-motion modes. As opposed to linear motion in self-rolling twisted ribbons under constant thermal actuation, the defected twisted ring exhibits three periodic coupled self-flip–spin–orbit motion with programmed circular and re-programmed non-circular paths in free and confined spaces, respectively, arising from the defect-induced rotational symmetry breaking in the twisted ring topology.

Environmental sciences rely heavily on accurate, timely and complete data sets which are often collected manually at significant risks and costs. Robotics and mobile sensor networks can collect data more effectively and with higher spatial-temporal resolution compared to manual methods while benefiting from expanded operational envelopes and added data collection capabilities. In future, robotics and AI will be an indispensable tool for data collection in complex environments, enabling the digitalisation of forests, lakes, off-shore energy systems, cities and the polar environment. However, such future robot solutions will need to operate more flexibly, robustly and efficiently than they do today. This talk will present how animal-inspired robot design methods can integrate adaptive morphologies, functional materials and energy-efficient locomotion principles to enable this new class of environmental robotics. The talk will also include application examples, such as flying robots that can place sensors in forests, aerial-aquatic drones for autonomous water sampling, drones for aerial construction and repair, and impact-resilient drones for safe operations in underground and tunnel systems.