Stiffening in Soft Robotics: A Review of the State of the Art

The need for building robots with soft materials emerged recently from considerations of the limitations of service robots in negotiating natural environments, from observation of the role of compliance in animals and plants 1, and even from the role attributed to the physical body in movement control and intelligence, in the so-called embodied intelligence or morphological computation paradigm 2-4. The wide spread of soft robotics relies on numerous investigations of diverse materials and technologies for actuation and sensing, and on research of control techniques, all of which can serve the purpose of building robots with high deformability and compliance. But the core challenge of soft robotics research is, in fact, the variability and controllability of such deformability and compliance.