Soft robotics has made tremendous strides over recent years, with new forms of soft actuators, sensors, and control strategies paving the way for physical intelligence. However, the field still faces challenges in power, performance, and control due to limited materials availability. To overcome these limitations, researchers are turning to nature for inspiration. Multifunctionality is the key to building emergent autonomous behavior that can integrate distributed actuation, perception, control, and energy capabilities in robotic agents. This requires new materials design paradigms that can tightly integrate multiple robotic capabilities to create functional materials that can perform tasks without human intervention. The symposium aims to bring together experts from materials science, soft robotics, chemistry, and mechanics to achieve this interdisciplinary vision. By collaborating across these fields, researchers can build beyond the current visions of robotic materials and create truly autonomous ones. The potential applications of this technology are vast, from soft robots that can perform delicate surgical procedures to autonomous systems that can monitor and repair infrastructure. This innovative approach provides research opportunities where both theory and experiments can produce discoveries and potential applications in Material science and Engineering, such as self-cleaning and functionalized actuators for AR, VR XR applications, environmentally adaptive surfaces, energy systems, responsive surfaces to communicate biological markers, situation adaptive protective gear and more.

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