![]() Innovative materials, mechanical design and learning control can provide fast, adaptive, and on-demand mechanical and optical displays to tackle various tasks in different scenarios. In particular, soft robots can be regarded to be prominent examples of a perfect multi-level platform. In the recent years, an interdisciplinary effort among the soft robotics and the soft matter communities, is laying the groundwork for innovative bioinspired sensors, actuators and control systems aiming at proprioceptive, multi-integrated, and autonomous robots ( Figure 1). Their “learning”, “mechanical” and “material intelligence” will be our lodestars along this review, resulting in a fascinating connection between the biological world and bioinspired industrial and technological outcomes. Thus, cephalopods are usually regarded as a perfect example of embodied intelligence, thanks to the symbiosis between their body's mechanics and morphology, and the distributed sensory neuro-motor-control system. Moreover, octopuses are a remarkable intelligent species, able, for example, to open a jar or avoid predators in the order of seconds. Soft muscular arrangements, spatially distributed and expandable absorbing components (namely chromatophores), iridescent elements (namely irido phores), and bright white scatterers (namely leucophores) are responsible for textural, postural and color changing. Undoubtedly, the most debated case of study in the natural world are cephalopods, which not only are highly evolved and specialized in fast adaptive color changing displays, but also are able to actuate their skin to generate 3D patterns, when exposed to specific mechanical, thermal, optical, or chemical stimuli. ![]() A complete knowledge about their central information process systems, can open to astonishing developments in many scientific branches, from neurobiology to quantum biology. Unfortunately, the nervous or central control-chain system that steers these behaviors in animals and plants, is still somehow fogged for scientists. The biotic color changing and body patterning relate to reproductive, communicative, and defensive and/or predatory strategies. In nature, several species take advantage of cryptic abilities, as, e.g., in cephalopods, crustaceans, reptilians, insects, birds, shells, plants, among many. Both these mechanisms are characterized by a time response that ranges from milliseconds to hundreds of seconds. In this sense, a living being can control its appearance optically (thanks to arranged and optimized structures at the mesoscopic scale, by means of pigmentation, or emissive elements) and morphologically (it can show wrinkles and textures on the body to evade detection or observation). At the biological level, the visual crypsis is the ability of a species to resemble the surroundings by matching the coloration and the geometrical patterns of the habitat. Regardless, every time a living being reveals novel adaptive and dynamically reactive mimicry behavior, it inspires and fosters futuristic and unexpected technological outcomes. ![]() The light-manipulation properties and the 3D surface textures of the skin of biological species have always fascinated the scientific community. This review aims to explore challenges and opportunities related to smart and chromogenic responsive materials for adaptive displays, reconfigurable and programmable soft skin, proprioceptive sensing system, and synthetic nervous control units for data processing, toward autonomous soft robots able to communicate and interact with users in open-world scenarios. Indeed, a system provided with a “learning and recognition” functions, and a constitutive “mechanical” and “material intelligence” can result in an improved morphological adaptation in multi-variate environments responding to external and internal stimuli. Soft robots are suitable platforms for soft multi-responsive materials, which can provide them with improved mechanical proprioception and related smarter behaviors. To be able to replicate deformable and compliant materials capable of translating mechanical perturbations in molecular and structural chromogenic outputs, could be a glorious achievement in materials science and in the technological field. ![]() Soft organic materials, biomacromolecules and protein ingredients in octopus skin combined with a distributed intelligence, result in adaptive displays that can control emerging optical behavior, and 3D surface textures with rough geometries, with a remarkably high control speed (≈ms). Octopus skin is an amazing source of inspiration for bioinspired sensors, actuators and control solutions in soft robotics. ![]()
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