Soft robots complement the existing efforts of miniaturizing conventional, rigid robots, and have the potential to revolutionize areas such as military equipment and biomedical devices. This type of system can accomplish tasks in complex and time-varying environments through geometric reconfiguration induced by diverse external stimuli, such as heat, solvent, light, electric field, magnetic field, and mechanical field. Approaches to achieve reconfigurable mesostructures are essential to the design and fabrication of soft robots. Existing studies mainly focus on four key aspects: reconfiguration mechanisms, fabrication schemes, deformation control principles, and practical applications. This review presents a detailed survey of methodologies for morphable mesostructures triggered by a wide range of stimuli, with a number of impressive examples, demonstrating high degrees of deformation complexities and varied multi-functionalities. The latest progress based on the development of new materials and unique design concepts is highlighted. An outlook on the remaining challenges and open opportunities is provided.

There exist some shallow scratch defects on the super-smooth optical surface. Their detection has a low efficiency with the existing technologies. So a new detection method, dark-field detection of adaptive smoothing and morphological differencing (DFD-ASMD), is proposed. On one hand, the information of shallow scratches can be kept in dark-field images. On the other hand, their weak characteristics can be separated and protected from being overly reduced during the elimination of noise and background in the image. Experiments show the detection rate of shallow scratches is around 82%, and DFD-ASMD can lay a foundation for quality control of defects on the high-quality optical surface.