Soft robotics: Technologies and systems pushing the boundaries of robot abilities

The proliferation of soft robotics research worldwide has brought substantial achievements in terms of principles, models, technologies, techniques, and prototypes of soft robots. Such achievements are reviewed here in terms of the abilities that they provide robots that were not possible before. An analysis of the evolution of this field shows how, after a few pioneering works in the years 2009 to 2012, breakthrough results were obtained by taking seminal technological and scientific challenges related to soft robotics from actuation and sensing to modeling and control. Further progress in soft robotics research has produced achievements that are important in terms of robot abilities-that is, from the…