Light-Driven Soft Actuators: Materials, Designs, and Applications

Abstract

Light-driven soft actuators have attracted extensive attention owning to their unique merits, including wireless remote actuation, precise spatiotemporal control, noncontact localized manipulation, as well as easily tunable properties. This review highlights recent advances in the design and fabrication of state-of-the-art light-driven soft actuators, starting from an overview of typical materials to the design strategies developed up to date, followed by discussion of their emerging applications in the contexts of biomimetic locomotion robotics, complex 3D architecture manufacturing, microfluidic systems, and biomedical research. At the end, we discuss opportunities and challenges in this rapidly growing field, together with perspectives on future directions.