Vine-Inspired Soft Robotics: Materials, Actuations, and Emerging Applications

Inspired by the tip-growth behavior of natural vines, vine-inspired robots have emerged as a distinctive paradigm in soft robotics, enabling adaptive extension and navigation in confined, fragile, and highly unstructured environments. Unlike conventional robots that rely on whole-body locomotion, vine-inspired robots extend by generating or deploying their body from the tip, making performance strongly dependent on material properties, interfaces, and processing strategies. This review provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances from a materials perspective. We first examine material strategies for fluid-driven eversion and phase-transition- or deposition-enabled growth, linking material chemistry, geometry, interfaces, and phase behavior to growth performance. We then discuss how material-structure design supports steering, retraction, multifunctional tip design, variable stiffness, climbing and attachment, and branching, while evaluating their performance trade-offs and technological maturity. Representative applications in medical diagnosis and intervention, navigation and exploration, transport and operational tasks, and deployable and reconfigurable structures are highlighted. Finally, we discuss key challenges in hierarchical material integration, scalable manufacturability, long-term reliability, and morphology-aware sensing and control, together with opportunities enabled by learning-based approaches and embodied intelligence. By connecting materials, growth mechanisms, functional capabilities, and application requirements, this review provides a unified framework for next-generation adaptive growing robots.