Here’s an interesting comment from MIT’s Alfonso Parra Rubio, “Treating soft versus hard robotics is a false dichotomy.” For, I suppose, obvious reasons, thinking around technology tends to be a bit…binary. Certainly we’ve traditionally regarded soft robots as being something that exists in direct opposition to their more traditional counterparts.
But the organic beings that inspire them are often some combination of rigid and soft. After all, what are we if not a bunch of soft tissue bound to a rigid skeletal structure. It follows, then, that roboticists would do well to marry the two, in order to harness the best of both worlds.
