  Soft robotics has opened a unique path to flexibility and environmental
adaptability, learning from nature and reproducing biological behaviors. Nature
implies answers for how to apply robots to real life. To find out how we learn
from creatures to design and apply soft robots, in this Review, we propose a
classification method to summarize soft robots based on different functions of
biological systems: self-growing, self-healing, self-responsive, and
self-circulatory. The bio-function based classification logic is presented to
explain why we learn from creatures. State-of-art technologies,
characteristics, pros, cons, challenges, and potential applications of these
categories are analyzed to illustrate what we learned from creatures. By
intersecting these categories, the existing and potential bio-inspired
applications are overviewed and outlooked to finally find the answer, that is,
how we learn from creatures.
