Building Magnetoresponsive Composite Elastomers for Bionic Locomotion Applications

The ability of natural living organisms, transferring deformations into locomotion, has attracted researchers' increasing attention in building bionic actuators and smart systems. As a typical category of functional materials, magnetoresponsive composite elastomers, comprised of flexible elastomer matrices and rigid magnetic particles, have been playing critical roles in this field of research due to their dynamic changes in response to applied magnetic field direction and intensity. The magnetically driven bionic actuators based on magnetoresponsive composite elastomers have been developed to achieve some specific functions in some special fields. For instance, under the control of the applied magnetic field, the bionic actuators can not only generate time-varying deformation, but also motion in diverse environments, suggesting new possibilities for target gripping and directional transporting especially in the field of artificial soft robots and biological engineering. Therefore, this review comprehensively introduces the component, fabrication, and bionic locomotion application of magnetoresponsive composite elastomers. Moreover, existing challenges and future perspectives are further discussed.