Hengxu Du

As vehicle intelligence and automotive electrification advance, the extensive deployment of distributed sensing nodes for comprehensive monitoring has grown rapidly. This poses severe challenges, such as rising onboard power consumption and the inability of conventional centralized power supply systems to sustain these sensors. Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), an emerging technology for energy harvesting and self-powered sensing, exhibit great potential to address the above challenges. This review systematically summarizes research on TENGs for vehicle energy harvesting and intelligent sensing, covering their fundamental working principles and applications in diverse vehicle scenarios. First, the basic principle and working modes of TENGs are described, and their suitability for complex and variable vehicle environments is evaluated. Subsequently, existing applications are categorized into three domains: vehicle vibration systems, wheel–road systems, and intelligent vehicle systems. Studies on various topics are reviewed, including vibration energy harvesting and sensing, vehicle collision monitoring, tire energy harvesting, road sensing, smart cockpits, human–machine interaction, and vehicle fluid monitoring. Emphasis is placed on their technical approaches and application prospects. Finally, the state-of-the-art research and prevailing technical bottlenecks are summarized, and potential solutions and future research perspectives are discussed. This review aims to support the reliable practical deployment of TENG technology in vehicle engineering and to provide a technical basis for energy-saving strategies and in situ sensing technologies for future intelligent vehicles.

Soft robots built from compliant materials and deformable structures are increasingly used in medical intervention, wearable assistance, delicate manipulation, and environmental exploration, where conventional rigid robots are limited by high mechanical impedance and poor morphological adaptability. However, their transition from laboratory prototypes to deployable systems remains constrained by coupled bottlenecks in materials, actuation, sensing, modeling, control, energy supply, and manufacturing. This review summarizes recent advances in soft robotics through an evaluative framework covering actuation and materials, modeling and simulation, control strategies, multimodal sensing, and representative applications. Instead of treating these topics as independent descriptions, we compare the underlying mechanisms, measurable performance indicators, strengths, limitations, and application boundaries. Three conclusions emerge. First, no single actuation strategy can simultaneously maximize output force, response speed, energy efficiency, durability, miniaturization, and untethered operation. Second, high-fidelity continuum models improve physical accuracy but remain difficult to use for real-time control, whereas reduced-order and data-driven models improve efficiency at the cost of generalization, interpretability, or contact fidelity. Third, practical soft robots will depend on system-level integration of embedded sensing, physics-informed learning, robust control, reliable materials, and scalable fabrication. Future progress should therefore prioritize standardized benchmarks, lifecycle reliability, energy-autonomous operation, and task-specific comparisons with rigid robotic systems.

Ocean current energy, owing to its predictability and stability, is regarded as an ideal power source for distributed marine observation networks and underwater intelligent equipment. However, conventional ocean current energy devices that rely on rigid turbines and electromagnetic generators generally suffer from high cut-in flow velocity, bulky size, high maintenance costs, and significant environmental disturbance, making them unsuitable for deep-sea, miniaturized, and long-duration power supply scenarios. These limitations highlight the urgent need for flexible and low-speed energy harvesters capable of autonomous, long-term operation. In recent years, nanogenerator technology has provided new opportunities for distributed and low-power ocean current energy harvesting. PENGs and TENGs can directly convert weak mechanical energy into electricity, enabling energy harvesting in small-scale and low-velocity flow fields. PENGs offer high durability and mechanical robustness, whereas TENGs exhibit superior output performance in low-speed and intermittent flows. This paper provides a comprehensive review of structural designs, material innovations, interface engineering, hybrid energy-conversion architectures, and power-management strategies for PENG- and TENG-based ocean current energy harvesters. Overall, future progress will rely on the integration of intelligent materials, multi-field coupling mechanisms, and system-level engineering strategies to achieve durable, scalable, and autonomous ocean current energy harvesting for distributed marine systems.

Wind energy holds potential for in-situ powering large-scale distributed wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. To achieve high performance in wind energy harvesting, a coaxial counter-rotating triboelectric nanogenerator with lift–drag hybrid blades, termed CCR-TENG, has been proposed. The CCR-TENG, which can work in non-contact and soft-contact modes, realizes low-speed wind energy harvesting through a combination of counter-clockwise rotating lift-type blades and clockwise rotating drag-type blades. Non-contact CCR-TENG realizes low-speed wind energy harvesting at wind speeds as low as 1 m/s. The output of a CCR-TENG, working in soft-contact mode, achieves 41% promotion with a maximum short-circuit current of 0.11 mA and a peak surface power density of 6.2 W/m² with two TENGs connected in parallel. Furthermore, the power density per unit of wind speed achieves 746 mW/m³·s/m. Consequently, two fluorescent lamps were successfully illuminated and six temperature sensors were continuously lit by the CCR-TENG. The reported CCR-TENG significantly improves low-speed environmental wind energy utilization and demonstrates broad application prospects for in-situ power supply of distributed wireless transmission devices and sensors in the era of the IoT.