Living beings have an unsurpassed range of ways to manipulate objects and interact with them. They can make autonomous decisions and can heal themselves. So far, a conventional robot cannot mimic this complexity even remotely. Classical robots are often used to help with lifting and gripping and thus to alleviate the effects of menial tasks. Sensors can render robots responsive, and artificial intelligence aims at enabling autonomous responses. Inanimate soft robots are a step in this direction, but it will only be in combination with living systems that full complexity will be achievable. The field of biohybrid soft robotics provides entirely new concepts to address current challenges, for example the ability to self‐heal, enable a soft touch, or to show situational versatility. Therefore, “living materials” are at the heart of this review. Similarly to biological taxonomy, there is a recent effort for taxonomy of biohybrid soft robotics. Here, an expansion is proposed to take into account not only function and origin of biohybrid soft robotic components, but also the materials. This materials taxonomy key demonstrates visually that materials science will drive the development of the field of soft biohybrid robotics.

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A novel and efficient strategy in obtaining series of mono-and bi-armed azobenzene-containing poly(3-caprolactone)s is described, starting from a commercially available azobenzene dye via azide/alkyne-"click"-reactions. The attachment of alkyne-telechelic poly(3-caprolactone)s (1 kDa and 3 kDa), followed by chromatographic separation, allowed the attachment of either one or two PCl-chains to either side of the azobenzene-dye. The resulting mono-and bi-armed photo-switchable polymers are fully characterized by 2D-NMR techniques and show a high thermal stability. Additionally liquid chromatography at critical conditions (LCCC) coupled to ESI-TOF allowed us to prove the presence of either one or two polymer chains affixed onto the central azobenzene dye.

We report the synthesis of azobenzene functionalized linear unsaturated/saturated polyolefin-oligomers.

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A X–Y2 type heterotropic single-chain polymer, Ba-(PnBuA-HW)2, is prepared in a one-pot two-step reaction, subsequently self-assembling into supramolecular dendrimers, which are displaying solvent-dependent disc-like hierarchical nanoscopic structures as evidenced by AFM.

Stimuli-responsive polymers processed into microfibers bear the potential to be fabricated as systems detecting stress-induced failures. Microfiber processing of spiropyran (SP)-functionalized polymer poly­(methyl acrylate) (PMA), in pristine form and as a blend with poly­(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), was studied. Material inhomogeneities such as bead formation and fiber–fiber fusion affected the durability of the microfibers which were aimed to be applied as self-reporting materials. The present study investigates the effect of polymer blending to improve the structural stability, i.e., the shape of the fibers compared to the nonblended PMA fibers (NBF). Blended microfibers (BF) with <4 wt % PMMA could overcome the structural malfunctions observed in NBF. Rheological analyses confirmed that there were no drastic alterations in the mechanical properties due to blending with a low amount of PMMA. We report the mechanoactivation in the structurally stable and durable BF processed via centrifugal force spinning (CFS). These fibers detected high strain deformations and retained the mechanochromic response after unloading. The color change in the BF confirms strain-induced isomerization of SP which will further assist in the visual inspection of damage before failure. The microfibers also showed reversible photochromism upon irradiation with ultraviolet (UV) light (360–370 nm) and green light (520–530 nm). The outstanding benefit of processing microfibers from polymer blends is the ease of obtaining structurally stable, self-reporting material with longer durability.