The ultimate vision of soft robotics is to create life-like robots—machines that grow, adapt, morph, think, recover, and even perish, returning to the environment without harmful waste, just like all living beings in nature. While this remains a distant goal, the pursuit of this vision drives our research.

One of the greatest challenges in achieving this vision is overcoming the boundaries between components, functionalities, and technologies in robot construction. Traditional robotic systems rely on specialized materials and dedicated manufacturing techniques tailored to specific functions—intelligence, actuation, and sensing. For instance, powerful CPUs and memory chips are not made from soft materials like rubbers, which form the body of most soft robots. Similarly, motors, the predominant actuators in conventional robots, cannot be fabricated using the micromachining tools employed in semiconductor manufacturing. This compartmentalized approach imposes fundamental limitations on the seamless integration of diverse functionalities.

Nature, in contrast, achieves extraordinary integration. Using the same fundamental materials (organic molecules) and the same fabrication method (cell division and differentiation), it builds highly functional and diverse structures—brains, muscles, eyes, and skin—across vastly different size scales, from the delicate wings of a hummingbird to the powerful limbs of an elephant. This unified approach enables seamless functional integration, something that remains elusive in artificial systems.

How can we develop a unified design and manufacturing methodology that allows soft robots to integrate multiple functions across different size scales, just as nature does? At BiRL, we are pioneering bio-inspired design and fabrication methods that could redefine how soft robots are built. We believe this approach has the potential to revolutionize science, engineering, and technology on a broad scale.

As a starting point, we leverage MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems) fabrication, the engineering framework behind the smallest machines in the world. By adapting MEMS techniques, we aim to develop multiscale and multifunctional soft robots for real-world applications in materials science, robotics, and biomedical devices. We are particularly interested in leveraging micro/nano-scale features in nature to enable novel functionalities in large-scale soft robots. At the same time, we are exploring ways to miniaturize existing soft robotic principles, unlocking new application possibilities that were previously unimaginable.

Through this approach, we hope to take a significant step toward realizing the future of truly life-like robots.