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Page 24 of 36 Chen et al. Soft Sci. 2026, 6, 9

Figure 12. LM composite-based soft gripper. (A) Soft gripper with magnetic reprogrammability and morphological reconfigurability [79] .
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2023, John Wiley and Sons; Electromagnetic soft gripper with (B) fast response [127] or (C)
mechanical bistable state [128] . Reprinted with permission [127] . Copyright 2024, IOP Publishing; Reprinted with permission [128] . Copyright
2023, John Wiley and Sons. LM: Liquid metal.

Soft gripper is a soft robotic end-effector that adaptively grasps fragile or irregularly shaped objects without
causing damage. Unlike the rigid gripper, it uses compliant materials like silicone elastomers to conform
gently to various surfaces. These grippers are especially useful in fields such as biomedical devices, food
handling, and logistics. Recently, LMs have been widely explored for developing advanced flexible grippers,
enabling a new generation of intelligent and adaptive manipulation systems . For example, the MLM was
[126]
encapsulated within PDMS to fabricate a magnetically and thermally controlled soft structure with a
regulatable stiffness [122] . Upon the application of a magnetic field, the stiffness can be rapidly increased by a
factor of four, whereas solidifying the encapsulated MLM enhances stiffness by a factor of ten. The
pneumatic soft gripper integrated with this structure exhibited tunable load capacity up to 450 g.

We have reported the dispersion of the MLM (NdFeB@InSnBi) microparticle into the elastomer to create a
reprogrammable magnetic composite by mixing the MLM bulk with the elastomer precursor [Figure 12A] .
[79]
Utilizing the phase transition of the InSnBi shell, the NdFeB microparticles can be reoriented to reprogram
the magnetization profile. With magnetic reprogrammability and morphological reconfigurability, the
corresponding gripper can grasp distinguished objects from 2D paper to 3D spitballs.

Moreover, electromagnetic soft grippers composed of LM circuits encapsulated in elastomer were also
developed. A high-performance electromagnetic gripper was created with ultrathin LM circuits and low
Young’s modulus silicone rubber, exhibiting an excellent deformation angle (265.25°) and bending angular
velocity (284.66 rad·s ) [Figure 12B] [127] . This gripper can capture the fast-moving targets with a speed of
-1
~1 m·s and also the vulnerable or soft objects, such as a water strider or droplet. Different from
-1