and actuation capabilities, from the macroscale down to the nanoscale (53). Just to take an example, most works on artificial skins with sensing capabilities can be found in the literature with applications to soft robots and soft devices. Looking at the literature of the past 10 years, there are many fundamental review or survey papers about soft and bioinspired robotics for a lot of applications (including medicine, where the issue of intrinsic safety is extremely relevant) and many materials science papers and reviews on novel smart materials, where traditional silicon-based technologies for sensing are replaced by silicone-based technologies with smart behavior. Considering the most highly cited papers of the past decade and excluding materials papers and survey papers, two types of works Downloaded from https://www.science.org on November 16, 2021 Dupont et al., Sci. Robot. 6, eabi8017 (2021) 10 November 2021 SCIENCE ROBOTICS | REVIEW 10 of 15 related to medicine can be identified: One includes wearable soft robots for rehabilitation or human augmentation, which have been covered in the previous sections. The second includes robots for intervention and surgery or components for intervention and surgical robotics. Concerning the field of surgery and intervention, three parallel subtopics can be identified: (i) soft devices for surgery or intervention, where the entire traditional device is replaced by a soft robotic design, both at the macro and miniature scale (45, 54); (ii) soft, bioinspired, or compliant components, which can work as standalone devices or can be integrated into more traditional systems (55, 56); (iii) soft components and systems for advanced simulators, both for training and for studying specific physiological functions (57–59), between robotics and bioartificial organs. In the first category, some interesting designs of modular and tunable stiffness devices for surgery and endoscopy have been developed and have reached the preclinical or the cadaver test level (54). The main idea is transforming surgical manipulators into elephant trunks or octopus arms with the ability to do more tasks with the same arm, by simply changing the stiffness of the different segments. Relevant results have been achieved also applying soft robotics technology to gastrointestinal capsule endoscopy, with the development of soft-body capsules for performing targeted drug delivery, as already mentioned above(44, 54). For the second category, bioinspired components—in some cases with a soft body or with a biomimetic safe interaction with the environment—have demonstrated superior capabilities in comparison with traditional devices (55, 60), e.g., in biopsy. However, a soft and bioinspired design was already explored more than 20 years ago for advanced endoscopes with the attempt to adapt the shape of the medical tool to the features of the explored human environment [as in (45, 46) mentioned above]. Last, there is a recent research direction, not easily falling into any categories, where soft robots are used for in vivo assistive or therapeutic devices (59, 61). With the exception of some studies at the intersection between magnetic microrobotics and soft robotics, which have already reached the clinical stage, most of the presented technologies still need extensive preclinical and clinical validation. The field of soft robotics, even if it has not produced paradigmatic examples of medical robotic systems yet, is steering the design and development of most medical instrumentation. In parallel, soft robotics is also nurturing research in soft materials and novel fabrication technologies, which can open unexpected avenues in biomedical applications. Continuum robots for medicine Continuum robots change shape through flexural deformation rather than through discrete joints. Their ability to take the shape of 3D curves enables this type of robot to perform procedures through smaller surgical corridors than would be required by traditional robotic mechanisms. They can enter the body through natural orifices, navigate through body lumens, and steer around critical structures when passing through solid tissue. The flexural compliance of continuum robots in contrast to conventional designs also enhances their safety. Continuum robots can be characterized by the actuation method used to produce flexural shape change. The most common approach to shape control is by varying the displacement or tension force applied to one or more tendons arranged around a central flexible backbone. A variation on this technique, called multibackbone designs, replaces the tendon strings with rods that can apply both tensile and compressive forces. A third type, concentric tube robots, blurs the roles of the actuation elements and backbone using the relative translation and rotation of precurved concentrically combined superelastic tubes to effect shape changes. Magnetic actuation, discussed in detail in another section of this paper, is a fourth technique in which external magnets positioned around the patient are used to produce the desired deflection of a magnetically tipped flexible tube. In the decade preceding 2010, the major research progress involved the development of design principles and mechanics-based kinematic models for tendon- and multibackbone-actuated continuum robot architectures. This