Soft robots are paving their way to catch up with the application range of metal-based machines and to occupy fields that are challenging for traditional machines. Pneumatic actuators play an important role in this development, allowing the construction of bioinspired motion systems. Pneumatic logic gates provide a powerful alternative for controlling pressure-activated soft robots, which are often controlled by metallic valves and electric circuits. Many existing approaches for fully compliant pneumatic control logic suffer from high manual effort and low pressure tolerance. In our work, we invented three-dimensional (3D) printable, pneumatic logic gates that perform Boolean operations and imitate electric circuits. Within 7 hours, a filament printer is able to produce a module that serves as an OR, AND, or NOT gate; the logic function is defined by the assigned input signals. The gate contains two alternately acting pneumatic valves, whose work principle is based on the interaction of pressurized chambers and a 3D-printed 1-millimeter tube inside. The gate design does not require any kind of support material for its hollow parts, which makes the modules ready to use directly after printing. Depending on the chosen material, the modules can operate on a pressure supply between 80 and more than 750 kilopascals. The capabilities of the invented gates were verified by implementing an electronics-free drink dispenser based on a pneumatic ring oscillator and a 1-bit memory. Their high compliance is demonstrated by driving a car over a fully flexible, 3D-printed robotic walker controlled by an integrated circuit.

Since its beginnings in the 1960s, soft robotics has been a steadily growing field that has enjoyed recent growth with the advent of rapid prototyping and the provision of new flexible materials. These two innovations have enabled the development of fully flexible and untethered soft robotic systems. The integration of novel sensors enabled by new manufacturing processes and materials shows promise for enabling the production of soft systems with ‘embodied intelligence’. Here, four experts present their perspectives for the future of the field of soft robotics based on these past innovations. Their focus is on finding answers to the questions of: how to manufacture soft robots, and on how soft robots can sense, move, and think. We highlight industrial production techniques, which are unused to date for manufacturing soft robots. They discuss how novel tactile sensors for soft robots could be created to enable better interaction of the soft robot with the environment. In conclusion this article highlights how embodied intelligence in soft robots could be used to make soft robots think and to make systems that can compute, autonomously, from sensory inputs.

This synopsis presents the state‐of‐the‐art of peristaltic pump systems in biomimetics and living nature, and allows for a comparison by highlighting the differences in structure and function, as well as advantages and drawbacks for technical implementation. For the first time, data of selected biological examples are collected in one study to give a comprehensive overview of the performance of biological peristaltic pumps. The developed biomimetic pumping systems not only mimic the biological principle and by this inherit its advantages, but also show the usability of the principle in various pumping applications and medical research. A direct comparison of peristaltic pump systems in nature, biomimetics, and technology highlights their similarities, differences, and allows for proposing new fields of application.

Bioinspired and biomimetic soft machines rely on functions and working principles that have been abstracted from biology but that have evolved over 3.5 billion years. So far, few examples from the huge pool of natural models have been examined and transferred to technical applications. Like living organisms, subsequent generations of soft machines will autonomously respond, sense, and adapt to the environment. Plants as concept generators remain relatively unexplored in biomimetic approaches to robotics and related technologies, despite being able to grow, and continuously adapt in response to environmental stimuli. In this research review, we highlight recent developments in plant-inspired soft machine systems based on movement principles. We focus on inspirations taken from fast active movements in the carnivorous Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) and compare current developments in artificial Venus flytraps with their biological role model. The advantages and disadvantages of current systems are also analyzed and discussed, and a new state-of-the-art autonomous system is derived. Incorporation of the basic structural and functional principles of the Venus flytrap into novel autonomous applications in the field of robotics not only will inspire further plant-inspired biomimetic developments but might also advance contemporary plant-inspired robots, leading to fully autonomous systems utilizing bioinspired working concepts.

Because plants are considered immobile, they remain underrepresented as concept generators for soft robots and soft machines. However, plants show a great variety of movements exclusively based on elastic deformation of regions within their moving organs. The absence of gliding parts, as found in the joints of vertebrates and insects, prevents stress concentration and attrition. Since plants have no central control unit (brain), stimulus-sensing, decision-making and reaction usually take place noncentrally in the hierarchically structured materials systems of the moving organs, in what can be regarded as an example of physical intelligence. These characteristics make plants interesting models for a new group of soft robots and soft machines that differ fundamentally from those inspired by animals. The potential of such plant-inspired soft robots and machines is shown in six examples and is illustrated by examples applied in architecture and medicine. Graphical

Moisture-harvesting lizards, such as the Australian thorny devil, Moloch horridus, have the remarkable ability to inhabit arid regions. Special skin structures, comprising a micro-structured surface with capillary channels in between imbricate overlapping scales, enable the lizard to collect water by capillarity and transport it to the mouth for ingestion. The ecological role of this mechanism is the acquisition of water from various possible sources such as rainfall, puddles, dew, condensation on the skin, or absorption from moist sand, and we evaluate here the potential of these various sources for water uptake by M. horridus. The water volume required to fill the skin capillary system is 3.19% of body mass. Thorny devils standing in water can fill their capillary system and then drink from this water, at approximately 0.7 µl per jaw movement. Thorny devils standing on nearly saturated moist sand could only fill the capillary channels to 59% of their capacity, and did not drink. However, placing moist sand on skin replicas showed that the capillary channels could be filled from moist sand when assisted by gravity, suggesting that their field behaviour of shovelling moist sand onto the dorsal skin might fill the capillary channels and enable drinking. Condensation facilitated by thermal disequilibrium between a cool thorny devil and warm moist air provided skin capillary filling to approximately 0.22% of body weight, which was insufficient for drinking. Our results suggest that rain and moist sand seem to be ecologically likely water sources for M. horridus on a regular basis.