Traditional joint replacement surgery faces the risk of enormous trauma and secondary revision while using medication to relieve symptoms can cause bone thinning, weight gain and interference with the patient's pain signalling. Medical research has therefore focused on minimally invasive solutions for implanting tissue-engineered scaffolds to induce cartilage regeneration and repair. In cartilage tissue engineering, there are still technical barriers to seed cells, scaffold construction techniques, mechanical properties, and the regulation of the internal environment on the transplanted material. This issue focuses on the development of cartilage repair, cutting-edge discoveries, manufacturing technologies, and the current technological queries still faced in cartilage regenerative medicine research. The articles in this collection cover the coordination of physical and biochemical signals, genes, and regulations by the extracellular environment.