A Porous Liquid-metal enabled Ubiquitous Soft Material (PLUS-M) was fabricated through loading chemically reactive iron nanoparticles into eutectic gallium–indium alloys (EGaIn), whose porosity and shape could be easily regulated via remote control. Such a PLUS-M could expand to a surprisingly large magnitude in a short time, say seven times its original volume, and generate adjustable closed cell foams inside. Owing to this unique property, the density of the PLUS-M can be easily controlled, allowing the PLUS-M to float on water or even pull up underwater heavy objects above the surface when subjected to heating. What's more, this porous material can transform between liquid and solid states through controlling the oxidation level of gallium using methods like heating and stirring. The reversible transformation between the solid porous structure and liquid state could be achieved more than 100 times without obvious performance degradation.

Most of the existing robots would find it difficult to stretch and transform all parts of their body together due to rigid components and complex actuation mechanisms inside. Here, we presented a highly transformable liquid-metal composite (LMC) that is easy to change shape in large magnitude and resume its original state again according to need. When subject to heating, part of the ethanol droplets embedded in the composite would change phase and then actuate. We demonstrate the flexible transformation of LMC-made octopus from a two-dimensional shape into several predictable three-dimensional shapes freely on a large scale (even up to 11 times its initial height) through remote wireless heating, which needs no sophisticated operating system at all. Further, several designed behaviors, such as movement of octopus and entangling objects of soft robots, are also realized. Theoretical analysis of the heating-induced liquid–vapor transition of the embedded ethanol droplet interprets the mechanisms involved. The present findings open a new way to fabricate functional transformable composites that would find significant applications in developing future generation soft robots.