Soft robots outperform the conventional hard robots on significantly enhanced safety, adaptability, and complex motions. The development of fully soft robots, especially fully from smart soft materials to mimic soft animals, is still nascent. In addition, to date, existing soft robots cannot adapt themselves to the surrounding environment, i.e., sensing and adaptive motion or response, like animals. Here, compliant ultrathin sensing and actuating electronics innervated fully soft robots that can sense the environment and perform soft bodied crawling adaptively, mimicking an inchworm, are reported. The soft robots are constructed with actuators of open-mesh shaped ultrathin deformable heaters, sensors of single-crystal Si optoelectronic photodetectors, and thermally responsive artificial muscle of carbon-black-doped liquid-crystal elastomer (LCE-CB) nanocomposite. The results demonstrate that adaptive crawling locomotion can be realized through the conjugation of sensing and actuation, where the sensors sense the environment and actuators respond correspondingly to control the locomotion autonomously through regulating the deformation of LCE-CB bimorphs and the locomotion of the robots. The strategy of innervating soft sensing and actuating electronics with artificial muscles paves the way for the development of smart autonomous soft robots.

Transfer printing is an emerging deterministic assembly technique for micro-fabrication and nano-fabrication, which enables the heterogeneous integration of classes of materials into desired functional layouts. It creates engineering opportunities in the area of flexible and stretchable inorganic electronics with equal performance to conventional wafer-based devices but the ability to be deformed like a rubber, where prefabricated inorganic semiconductor materials or devices on the donor wafer are required to be transfer-printed onto unconventional flexible substrates. This paper provides a brief review of recent advances on transfer printing techniques for flexible and stretchable inorganic electronics. The basic concept for each transfer printing technique is overviewed. The performances of these transfer printing techniques are summarized and compared followed by the discussions of perspectives and challenges for future developments and applications.

Organelle-targeted activatable photosensitizers are attractive to improve the specificity and controllability of photodynamic therapy (PDT), however, they suffer from a big problem in the photoactivity under both normoxia and hypoxia due to the limited diversity of phototoxic species (mainly reactive oxygen species). Herein, by effectively photocaging a π-conjugated donor–acceptor (D–A) structure with an N-nitrosamine substituent, we established a unimolecular glutathione and light coactivatable photosensitizer, which achieved its high performance PDT effect by targeting mitochondria through both type I and type II (dual type) reactions as well as secondary radicals-participating reactions. Of peculiar interest, hydrogen radical (H•) was detected by electron spin resonance technique. The generation pathway of H• via reduction of proton and its role in type I reaction were discussed. We demonstrated that the synergistic effect of multiple reactive species originated from tandem cascade reactions comprising reduction of O2 by H• to form O2 •–/HO2 • and downstream reaction of O2 •– with •NO to yield ONOO–. With a relatively large two-photon absorption cross section for photoexcitation in the near-infrared region (166 ± 22 GM at 800 nm) and fluorogenic property, the new photosensitizing system is very promising for broad biomedical applications, particularly low-light dose PDT, in both normoxic and hypoxic environments.

Magnetically actuated aphid-inspired dry adhesion is developed with rapid tunability and high reversibility and demonstrated in transfer printing both in air and in a vacuum.