Designing softness into robots holds great potential for augmenting robotic compliance in dynamic, unstructured environments. However, despite the body's softness, existing models mostly carry inherent hardness in their driving parts, such as pressure-regulating components and rigid circuit boards. This compliance gap can frequently interfere with the robot motion and makes soft robotic design dependent on rigid assembly of each robot component. We present a skin-like electronic system that enables a class of wirelessly activated fully soft robots whose driving part can be softly, compactly, and reversibly assembled. The proposed system consists of two-part electronic skins (e-skins) that are designed to perform wireless communication of the robot control signal, namely, "wireless inter-skin communication," for untethered, reversible assembly of driving capability. The physical design of each e-skin features minimized inherent hardness in terms of thickness (<1 millimeter), weight (~0.8 gram), and fragmented circuit configuration. The developed e-skin pair can be softly integrated into separate soft body frames (robot and human), wirelessly interact with each other, and then activate and control the robot. The e-skin-integrated robotic design is highly compact and shows that the embedded e-skin can equally share the fine soft motions of the robot frame. Our results also highlight the effectiveness of the wireless interskin communication in providing universality for robotic actuation based on reversible assembly.

Additional surgeries for implantable biomedical devices are inevitable to replace discharged batteries, but repeated surgeries can be a risk to patients, causing bleeding, inflammation, and infection. Therefore, developing self-powered implantable devices is essential to reduce the patient's physical/psychological pain and financial burden. Although wireless communication plays a critical role in implantable biomedical devices that contain the function of data transmitting, it has never been integrated with in vivo piezoelectric self-powered system due to its high-level power consumption (microwatt-scale). Here, wireless communication, which is essential for a ubiquitous healthcare system, is successfully driven with in vivo energy harvesting enabled by high-performance single-crystalline (1 − x)Pb(Mg 1/3 Nb 2/3 )O 3 −(x)Pb(Zr,Ti)O 3 (PMN-PZT). The PMN-PZT energy harvester generates an open-circuit voltage of 17.8 V and a short-circuit current of 1.74 µA from porcine heartbeats, which are greater by a factor of 4.45 and 17.5 than those of previously reported in vivo piezoelectric energy harvesting. The energy harvester exhibits excellent biocompatibility, which implies the possibility for applying the device to biomedical applications.

A single crystal Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3‐Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PMN‐PZT) energy harvester is demonstrated by solid‐state crystal growth and an optimized delamination process. The flexible harvester generates an output voltage of 100 V and a current of 20 µA. The advanced reconfigurable rectifying circuit enhanced conversion efficiency of the PMN‐PZT harvester is compared to conventional rectifier. Finally, a self‐powered military boot is fabricated using the harvester as a demonstration of use in operating consumer electronics.

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