Nanomaterials and nanotechnology for biomedical soft robots

Soft robots have opened an emerging research direction in robotics due to their promising performance enabled by functional materials and fabrication technology. Recent progress of functional materials has brought soft robots with advanced functionalities and greatly expanded their potential applications in various fields. Biomedical applications have attracted significant research interests and become an emerging field. Particular trends have been shifted to the submillimeter-scale biomedical soft robots and the integrated manipulatable devices with well controllability and compatibility. Functionalities of these biomedical soft robots are dominated by nanomaterials and nanotechnology. However, lack of study has overviewed the promising development progress of functional nanomaterials and advanced nanotechnology in soft robots for biomedical applications. It is worthwhile to review such an important but not yet fully exposed research trend. To address such research gap, this review article focuses on the recent achievements, technological challenges and future trends of the nanomaterials and nanotechnology used in biomedical soft robots. We provide a state-of-the-art review on the current progress while mainly focusing on explaining the mechanism and functionality of the soft robots with respect to the nanomaterials and nanotechnology. In the end, we summarize the main challenges of biomedical soft robots and envision the future trends by outlooking the development of advanced nanomaterials and nanotechnology.