Stiffness modelling and control for soft material continuum robotic manipulators
Author(s)
Shi, Jialei
Gaozhang, Wenlong
Abad, Sara-Adela
Wurdemann, Helge
Type
Chapter
Abstract
Soft robots, made from compliant materials, offer high flexibility and enable continuous deformation, resulting in inherently safe and adaptive interactions with their environments. Unlike rigid-link robots where compliance is typically localized at discrete joints, soft robots exhibit distributed compliance throughout their structure. This fundamental difference underscores a deep understanding of their intrinsic compliance, or its inverse, stiffness, which is essential for developing other static models such as forward kinematics and contact force models. This work provides a comprehensive review of existing stiffness-related modelling approaches for soft continuum robots, such as techniques based on analytical formulations, numerical methods, and data-driven strategies. Furthermore, it highlights how robot stiffness critically influences the accuracy and effectiveness of static models and contact control methods, which are essential for enabling robust and precise interaction with the environment.
Editor(s)
Raatz, Annika
Date Issued
2026-06-19
Citation
Soft Material Robotic Systems, 2026, pp.223-238
ISBN
978-3-032-22452-1
Publisher
Springer
Start Page
223
End Page
238
Journal / Book Title
Soft Material Robotic Systems
Copyright Statement
© 2026 The Author(s). This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it.
Identifier
10.1007/978-3-032-22453-8_15
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2026-06-19