Soft Robotics: Design, Modeling and Control, a Unified Approach (Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, 163)

This book provides a comprehensive and rigorous framework for the emerging field of soft robotics, addressing key challenges at the intersection of design, modeling, and control.Moving beyond traditional rigid-body paradigms, it explores how compliant materials enable new capabilities in dexterity, adaptability, and safe interaction, while simultaneously introducing significant theoretical and practical complexities. The volume presents a unified, multidisciplinary framework that integrates continuum mechanics, optimization, and control theory to systematically tackle the challenges of this rapidly evolving field.It introduces novel methodologies for the automated design and fabrication of soft actuators, advanced reduced-order modeling techniques grounded in differential geometry, and efficient model-based control strategies tailored to highly deformable robotic systems. Bridging theory and practice, the book demonstrates how these tools can be applied to real-world soft robotic platf